Quotes About Narrative

I'm telling you stories. Trust me.

There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.

I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.

I choose this story above all others because it's a story I'm struggling to end.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky amphetamine world. That woman-a pieta. Those men, rough angels with an unknown message. The children holding hands, spanning time. And in every still-life, there is a story, the story that tells you everything you need to know.

It was a long story, and like most of the stories in the world, never finished. There was an ending - there always is - but the story went on past the ending - it always does.

There's no story that's the start of itself.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. That is why we invent stories, I said. And what if we are the story we invent? said Shelley.

Stories end in reverie, tragedy, or forgiveness.

There are only three possible endings —aren't there? — to any story: revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That's it. All stories end like that.

History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way.

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something is missing.

Stories are always true... it's the facts that mislead.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open - the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

People like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so that they know what to believe and what not to believe.

I can change the story. I am the story.

When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open -- the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

There was an ending - there always is - but the story went on past the ending - it always does.

It's why I am a writer...To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own.

Vertel me een verhaal, Silver. Wat voor verhaal? Het verhaal van wat daarna gebeurde. Dat hangt ervan af. Waarvan? Van hoe ik het vertel.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently

Life, we imagine, is familiar enough until we begin to tell it to another. Then, observe the wonder on their faces--sometimes it is wonder, often it is horror. Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.