Quotes About Narrative

I have been too fond of stories.

Food and shelter are very nice, but without stories to hear and tell, we might as well be the walking dead.

We are at the mercy of our own narrative impulses.

I have an inability to consider a thing without imagining the story behind it as a needful force, a great petitioning weight.

It was the tiniest scrap of misinformation, insignificant really. But. . . . That was not the story at all.

And of course, if there's one thing we feel we can take as truth in these books it's Katniss and her narrative. But we should ask ourselves whether even this should be above suspicion. Like all first-person narrators, Katniss is her own editor with her own biases: she chooses how to present herself and those around her. Katniss has a stake in the story she's telling and what that stake is changes how she portrays the events and her emotional reaction to them.

team of good storytellers can fix a bad story, but a poor team cannot.

History never repeats itself, historians do.

He told me it didn't really matter if it was true, it was what the story MEANT that was so important.

Darrow was obviously struggling to create a story where there wasn't one yet. Eve didn't blame her for that. If Eve had her way, Darrow wouldn't have to wait long. Every corpse, even one that was just scattered bones for now, had a story. It was Eve's job to find it.

Bullshit. You got where you are by leveraging your media exposure from that YouTube video. Then you solved a triple murder and pulled off a daring rescue, adding a narrative spine to your story. It was a brilliant use of social media.

Kristen Murphy

Uncertainty is a good thing at the end of a narrative. A simultaneous gain and loss captures the complexity of human existence. The way one sentence follows another, if we pay attention to syntax and rhythm, should express the final effect we want the narrative to have on a reader.

Any event once it has occurred can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.

We're lucky. Most of our men are good story men. In fact, they have to be. A fellow who's a good artist, but isn't good at telling a story in this form ... in continuity form ... can't really work for us.

For me, everyone I write of is real. I have little true say in what they want, what they do or end up as (or in). Their acts appall, enchant, disgust or astound me. Their ends fill me with retributive glee, or break my heart. I can only take credit (if I can even take credit for that) in reporting the scenario. This is not a disclaimer. Just a fact.

We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. And that's where I put myself: as a storyteller. Not necessarily a high priestess, but certainly the storyteller. And I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe.

A good story is at its best when the line between truth and fiction remains ambiguous.

Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it requires something to put a handsome face on a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offenses, particularly of blood and wounds...

Dead women tell no tales. Sad men write them down.

If you like books with happy endings then put this book down immediately.

A mystery is solved with a story.

In any case, this is how all our stories begin, in darkness with our eyes closed, and all our stories end the same way, too, with all of us uttering some last words—or perhaps someone else's—before slipping back into darkness as our series of unfortunate events comes to an end.

If you enjoy books with happy endings than you are better off reading some other book.