Quotes About Narrative

The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.

may be easier to lasso the wind than to find a sustaining story for the American West. Still, as storytellers it is our obligation to keep trying.

The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine on harvest day, from victory stands.

Si esto es un hombre y La tregua (Club Círculo de Lectores, 2004), de Primo Levi,

it's never too late to replace the stories you tell yourself

You are the author of your own life, and it's never too late to replace the stories you tell yourself and the world.

Once you have enough for beans and rice and taking care of your family and a few other things, money is a story. You can tell yourself any story you want about money, and it's better to tell yourself a story about money that you can happily live with.

People don't like being sold products, but we all like being told stories. Work

If a narrative isn't working, well then, really, why are you using it? The narrative isn't done to you; the narrative is something that you choose. Once we can dig deep and find a different narrative, then we ought to be able to change the game.

Para mí el éxito consiste en crearte un guion propio.

Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those "easy speeches that comfort cruel men."

History is never the simple recounting of the past as it really was. It is inevitably an interpretation of the past, a retrospective vision of the past, which is limited both by the sources themselves and by the historian who selects and interprets them.

Most religions live from a narrative that shapes their relationship with the divine other, God or the gods, and with the human other, the stranger.

The unutterable violence of the Holocaust shook our confidence in the possibility of telling any story of faith at all.

The seduction by a mythicized pas prevents us from thinking about possible futures

Churchill said that history would be kind to him, because he intended to write it himself. Yet in his vast histories and memoirs, he presented his own decisions as self-evident, and credited the British people and Britain's allies. Today what Churchill did seems normal, and right. But at the time he had to stand out.

Auschwitz has also become the standard shorthand of the Holocaust because, when treated in a certain mythical and reductive way, it seems to separate the mass murder of Jews from human choices and actions. Insofar

Is truth nothing more than a convention of power, or can truthful historical accounts resist the gravity of politics?

European Union and the United States were presented as threats because Russian elections were faked. In winter 2011 and spring 2012, Russian television channels and newspapers generated the narrative that all who protested electoral fraud were paid by Western institutions.

Things become bearers of memory and information, especially when enhanced by stories that expand their capacity to carry meaning.

Without Ruth, there would be no record.

This impulse to preserve past knowledge by hitching narrative explanation to items exhibits what Ulrich calls the 'mnemonic power of goods.' Things become bearers of memory and information, especially when enhanced by stories that expand their capacity to carry meaning.

Moi, je voulais comprendre la guerre. Bien sûr, je voulais aussi la voir car je voulais la décrire, mais je me suis rendue compte que ceux qui me tiraient dessus depuis une rangée de palmiers, moi qui m'étais jeté la tête la première dans un fossé pour m'abriter, ces hommes étaient aussitôt devenus mes "ennemies". Mais étaient-ils mes "ennemis" ? Non. Si j'avais continué comme ça tout au long de la guerre, je ne l'aurais jamais comprise. (p. 120)

Just stories? Stories can build up an empire, or strike down a people. You can spell the most powerful spell, ease a friend's hurt, or break an enemy. Stories make you believe.