Quotes About Narrative

she would have to tell the story of this afternoon to herself over and over until she could make a different shape from it to comfort herself.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

We are creatures of story.

The truth lies somewhere between the reasons and the stories.

Ted shows me his school composition, a rewrite of Snow White from the point of view of the dwarves: 'So you think we liked Snow White? You are completely WRONG.

the core narrative of how society is organized and how it is reciprocally explained by its inhabitants with reference to a set of collective values deemed appropriate to underpin it.

That state has gone, but its narrative enthralls those deaths still today. It is for this reason that the Francoist dead and the Republican dead are still not, nor ever were in the 1980s and 1990s, similar quantities to be "remembered and named".

The people who lived beside the river for thousands of years, and whose history was intertwined with that landscape, have been very effectively excluded from ts recorded narrative.

If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life.

I can't, even now, arrange it in the right order. The memories are like heavy blocks of glass. I can put them down in different places but they don't make a story.

I think of all the complicated histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to wipe them away, put easier, safer histories in their place.

Responding to myth often means wearing blinkers. Myth is a complex game of production and reception that involves selecting some parts of a narrative and suppressing others. As we shall see later on, this process of communication is not always easily controlled.

Scholars have produced as many definitions of myth as there are myths themselves. This book will discuss various definitions of myth as it goes along, but it is interested in myth as a process as much as a thing.

However, I have also argued for allegory's positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.

While telling her I realised that the story of her is much more to do with how she is ended than how she began.

Kazim used to give me strange looks whenever I tapped a corner of one of his comic strips and asked what was next. He thought it was strange of me to ask. What's next is what happened before.

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a Leitmotiv.

Nothing disappears completely ... In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows ... Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.

He had however one great advantage over both his Pilgrim and Puritan enemies, for he wrote a narrative of his adventures in a reckless and amusing fashion of which they were incapable, and thus has kept the laugh forever on his side.

L'anecdote, cette moisissure qui se forme sur tous les livres.

History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern traveler.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.

Now, suppose you tell me exactly what is going on," Papa Pete began. "I don't know where to start," I said. "Try the beginning," said Papa Pete.