Quotes About Narrative

As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?'... By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.

We are always telling stories to ourselves, about ourselves...But we can control those stories...I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them

I realized," he'd say. "I realized that I had the choice. I could give this moment a meaning, or I could choose to ignore it. It just depended on the kind of story I wanted to tell myself.

We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves," he'd say. Sometimes he would make a gesture that was almost like a touch, though he actually rarely made skin-to-skin contact. "But we can control those stories," he'd say. "I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them.

It was the great Russian author Chekhov who wrote, "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

H]istory viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

It was late morning when Kassad finished his story.

Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.

Their three approaches fail but somehow the story itself succeeds, despite its narrator's and even author's failures!

Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, I will tell them about her. I will sing to them of Siri.

I was beginning to see the danger in adhering to a single narrative, hewing to a story. The peril wasn't only in getting it wrong. It was a kind of calcification, a narrowing, a perversion of reality that hardened and stilled the spirit.

I clung to the only story I could tolerate.

This is a work of nonfiction.

It is true that the original of this story is put into new words, and the style of the famous lady we here speak of is a little altered; particularly she is made to tell her own tale in modester words that she told it at first, the copy which came first to hand having been written in language more like one still in Newgate than one grown penitent and humble, as she afterwards pretends to be.

To give the history of a wicked life repented of, necessarily requires that the wicked part should be make as wicked as the real history of it will bear, to illustrate and give a beauty to the penitent part, which is certainly the best and brightest, if related with equal spirit and life.

Maybe, generations ago, young people rebelled out of some clear motive, but now, we know we're rebelling. Between teen movies and sex-ed textbooks we're so ready for our rebellious phase we can't help but feel it's safe, contained. It will turn out all right, despite the risk, snug in the shell of rebellion narrative. Rebellion narrative, does that make sense? It was appropriate to do, so we did it.

After all, I was only eighteen then. I'm almost twenty now. I learned lots about narrative structure in my Honors English classes so I know what I'm doing.

History is written by the winners

The first literary work in prose was history. And we call Herodotus (c.480–c.425 B.C.) the Father of History because his is the earliest surviving work in Greek prose that aimed to give literary form to an extended narrative of the past. The Greek historie means "inquiry" or the search for truth. Herodotus might also perhaps be called the Father of Prose, for until his time verse was still the normal vehicle for narratives of great events and heroes of the past.

Herodotus also repeatedly reports the prophetic power of dreams, though he leaves the reader to judge.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

Essere vivi significa avere qualcosa da raccontare. Vuol dire essere l'eroe, il protagonista di una vicenda. Quando si diventa un personaggio marginale nella narrazione di qualcun altro, allora si è davvero morti.

T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

What he had to tell them was a story