Quotes About Narrative

Everybody thought that history was like a book with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's not how it worked. Real life was all middle.

She took a deep breath and asked, "I'm sorry, Captain. I'm feeling a bit discombobulated. Can you please start from the beginning and tell me what happened?

Well." Lydia took a deep breath as she prepared to sing the hokey pokey of her life story, where she put the truth in, pulled a lie out, added an embellishment, and shook it all about.

Don't overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.

Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.

She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.

When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day.

Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view.

Every man is the hero of his own song.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

Biography is to give a man some kind of shape after his death.

In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.

I want to be remembered as someone who tried to bring the story of our ancestors to the broadest possible audience. I want to be remembered as a man who loved his race.

What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.

It doesn't matter to me whether I write in a man's voice or a woman's, or first or third person for that matter. Those choices come down to the story and I just go with it.

It was useless to try to corner a man who told stories. It was like trying to drink all the water in a lake to get at a bright pebble on the bottom of it.

Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

I didn't follow the whole 'X-Men' story because it got too complicated. I'd pick up a comic book and have no idea what was going on.

I think that women definitely have a special bond as friends that is hard to describe to men, and we don't often see that portrayed narratively.

A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.

Every man is a hero of his own story.

He said that whether a man's life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.

So yo then man what's your story?