Quotes About Narrative

If you wish to avoid an unpleasant story you had best put this book down

The infant was standing on a spot in someone else's story, during a moment of her own.

A mystery is solved with a story. The story starts with a clue, but the trouble is that you usually have no idea what the clue is, even if you think you know.

Even the most ridiculous of stories can contain a grain of truth.

One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end

The central theme of Anna Karenina," he said, "is that a rural life of moral simplicity, despite its monotony, is the preferable personal narrative to a daring life of impulsive passion, which only leads to tragedy.

the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now.

I feel like I don't watch that many shows with death.

All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.

History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.

Third: Act first, explain later. Stamp this axiom on your writer's brain. Or put it on a note and tape it where you can see it. This advice never fails.

A good story transports the reader to a new place via experience. Not through arguments or facts, but through the illusion that life is taking place on the page. Not

What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

Myth is not about facts

No book can convey the depths of the black experience without including material from the oppressed group. Yet not one textbook in my original sample let African Americans speak for themselves.

History is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies.

No sensible Indian person," wrote George P. Horse Capture, "can celebrate the arrival of Columbus."90 Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

For that matter, even if the owners and workers in a historic site had not included a president, most visitors would want to hear about the important events in their lives, not just about their furniture.

How people think about the past is an important part of their consciousness.

Any telling of history requires choices as to what is included and what is left out and is therefore by definition an interpretation.

In the 1920s, Florida and other Southern states passed laws requiring "Securing a Correct History of the U.S., Including a True and Correct History of the Confederacy.

The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily written as the history of its dominant class. —KWAME NKRUMAH

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.