Quotes About Narrative

History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

Quotations can be a comedy or a drama, tell of the whole world or just a small piece of it.

Be cautious what tales you tell yourself — you're writing your own autobiography.

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.

I go through a story for lies. I might discover the lie of trying to show off. Sometimes they're lies of character. Sometimes they are lies of writing the most beautiful sentence in the world that has nothing to do with the story.

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Our task is to decipher the meaning of the historical-theological text in biblical narrative, not to reconstruct the original event.

Since the end is never told, We pay the teller off in gold, But he cannot be bought or sold.

don't rely on death to be the climax of your stories. Dying isn't interesting. It's what we do while we're dying that matters.

Every life holds an epic tale, even if no one alive remembers it.

Every story has a structure. Most simply, a beginning, a middle, and an end—although, as Bilbo recognizes in The Lord of the Rings, the story never really ends, and there is always something that came before the beginning of any tale we might tell.

My children and I inhabited those stories together. A good story allows you to admit your fears, and hope that you might be a hero in the face of them. I'm not sure why adults so often lose the art of "entering" a story in written form.

If only these walls could talk…the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone's a liar.

Every dollar has a story to tell," Vonn Carp in Dollarapalooza.

Remembering a narrative alters it.

There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitiveand getting away with itis far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun.

when poets go back by way of memory and imagination to past traumas to engage or re-engage them, then those poets are taking control—are shaping and ordering and asserting power over the hurtful events. In lyric poems, they're both telling the story from their point of view and also shaping the experience into an order (the poem) that shows they have power over what (in the past) overpowered them.

We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.

D. H. Lawrence's "Never trust the teller. Trust the tale" is always right.

The official, standard history of rock 'n' roll is true, but it's not the whole truth. It's not the truth at all. It's a constructed story that has been disseminated so comprehensively that people believe it, but it's not true to their experience, and it may even deform or suppress their experience.

If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.

video games are the comic books of our time... It's a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia".