Quotes About Narrative

I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong.

I always ask my students to answer two questions about the work they and their peers have written: What happened in this story? and What is this story about?

Or rather, it's a bunch of what happened that ends up being about nothing at all.

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on the story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.

Judas. It's none of your business how other people spend their money. Mary bought this expensive nard as an expression of her love. That love will be remembered for thousands of years.

For the story — from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace — is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told; And all who told it added something new, And all who hear'd it made enlargements too, In ev'ry ear it spread, on ev'ry tongue it grew.

It is said that the first storyteller crept at night to listen to the gods talking in their sleep — so each tale collected contained the breath of gods.

Those who tell the stories rule the world.

It takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.

Faith! he must make his stories shorter, Or change his comrades once a quarter...

Fully understanding spoils the story — the best are always translucent.

To be sure, every football play is in a sense a short narrative. First come the signals of the quarterback. That is the preliminary exposition. Then the plot thickens, action becomes intense and a climax is reached whereby the mood of tragedy or comedy is established.

I write because... every writer has only one story to tell, really, and I haven't told mine yet.

There are always three sides to every story: your side, the other side, and the truth.

History is herstory too.

Those who tell the stories rule society.

I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.

The coming-of-age story has sort of become a joke. It's something to capitalize on, and that is painful because when you are coming of age- when you are going through something like that – the genre is so meaningful.

narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time.

Everybody must have a story. For those who don't, we need to invent one.

She has to be written out of history and written into myth.

A burning map. Every epic, my friend Jack used to say, should start with a burning map. Like in the movies. Fucking flames burning the world away; that's the best thing about all those old films, he said -- when you see this old parchment map just ... getting darker and darker in the centre, crisping, crinkling until suddenly it just ... fwoom.

A burning map. Every epic, my friend Jack used to say, should start with a burning map. Like in the movies. Fucking flames burning the world away; that's the best thing about all those old movies, he said - when you see this old parchment map just… getting darker and darker in the centre, crisping, crinkling until suddenly it just… fwoom