Quotes About Narrative

It was fun playing with those jumps and the flashbacks in 'Zombieland,' but I don't think you need it to make a good movie. It's fun to just do a more straightforward one.

Other people are talking about writing books about my life, or about some of the things I've done. I find it strange, but I also feel it's my life and my story, and I guess I better be the one to get it on paper the way it actually happened.

It's strange to look back over a full season. Our characters have accrued all these memories, but so have we, the actors. And sometimes the character memories and the actor memories bleed into each other.

QTE is a very strange thing... it really depends on what you expect from your game experience.

I grew up thinking that renting is perfectly normal. And then, strangely enough, I never did buy a house. I live in New York City, and I'm still renting. My own personal narrative shows that it is possible to live a respectable life without ever having owned a home.

Since the Greek myths, the greatest stories are premised on the idea of, 'A stranger arrives.'

Those Duffer Brothers really know how to tell a story, and I think it makes you want to watch. 'Stranger Things' is remarkably watchable.

Telling a story is not like weaving a tapestry to cover up the world, it is rather a way of guiding attention of listeners or readers into it.

the modern Ukrainian state is that it has never been able to create an all-encompassing post-Soviet narrative of modern Ukrainian history that was broadly accepted by most, if not all.

The facts miss the heart of the matter; to give us a clear picture, the facts need a vehicle, the anecdote

You are here so that I can hear what happened at the top of Stav Kesh. I've learned through my long life that stories are ... fluid. And that the truth is often found in the sum of the parts. So I'll have each of you tell me your own version of events. - Master Lha-Mi

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

But this too is true: stories can save us.

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

The canon is finished. Anyone who believes that one can construct a canon from the tidal wave of narrative produced today is guilty of wishful thinking. All we will have is a record of who won the prizes and achieved celebrity status. But, perhaps, the canon was always a fairly heavy-handed tool and little more than a convenience. The only thing is to follow one's nose and listen carefully to the way others talk about books, learn who's opinion takes you to interesting places.

a novelist's work is often a strategy (I don't mean the author need be aware of this) for dealing with some personal dilemma. Not just that the dilemma is "worked out" in the narrative, as critics often tell us, but that the acts of writing and publishing and positioning oneself in the world of literature are all part of an attempt to find a solution, however provisional, to some deep personal unease.

people want to establish a canon, because people want to imagine that there are great writers and lesser writers and they want the mythology, they want the narrative for themselves. And it's embarrassing.

the story, and the conviction it carries, are part of the teller's way of organizing his own life.

Much is said about escapism in narrative and fiction. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

That's how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must've got left out.

Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War is the culmination of the fifth-century tendency toward the exclusion of divine explanation. Not only does he refuse to admit non-naturalistic causality, but he cynically skewers any attempts on the part of the actors in his story to invoke the gods. Whatever his own personal beliefs were, the History can reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history.

In the end, every man's life is but a tale told to him that's lived it, and to him alone.