Quotes About Narrative

You are shifting from … … the past occurring as a series of events that "really happened" and are "the" truth … … to … … the past occurring as a series of interpretations you've made about events that happened, all of which are valid and none of which represent "the" truth.

SUPPOSE YOU closed this book right now and started to tell a story about your life from now until the moment you die—the moment that they throw dirt on your face and your life turns out the way it does. What would that story include?

We are all free to make our own decisions–but if the information on which we base those decisions is carefully selected and presented to us in the "pre-thought for you" form of a story, then how much of an informed decision can we make?

Sometimes telling what happened, in whatever way you can, is a means of lightening your burden. It summons others to help you bear the weight of your own story, so that you might finally get out from under it.

My dad was just a big Joseph Campbell nut.

Happy endings are a luxury of fiction.

It is not easy to speak of people and land in simple terms beginnings with a beginning and ending with an end.

Because history is told by the victors. Everything else falls away.

There's more to his story. There's always more to everyone's story, if you bother to find out what it is.

a dark cave listening to Webs drone on about the ancient past? This is history, happening right now. We're in the middle of it, or we should be.

I wonder how the dragons would tell it, if they could tell their own stories.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.

We come to life in the middle of stories that are not ours.

The struggle for survival of the gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans in the wild has to be seen within the context of the political, social, and environmental circumstances that surround them, and so those issues are essential to the narrative.

The picture says that what we heard and were told in the newspapers, the media, was not the real story. There's enough doubt in the official story, where the stories were absolutely not consistent with what happened. They paint a different picture than the one that was given to the media.

Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale.

But I was not looking for repose or tranquility. This weekend was an aberration. It is pleasant in Mexico to sit by the beach, inert and sunlit, sipping a mojito, but who wants to hear about that? What you crave in reading a travel narrative is the unexpected, a taste of fear, the sudden emergence by the roadside of a wicked policeman, threatening harm.

I'm a writer, I said. I like long stories.

How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there

Fiction give life to places in expressive ways that no history book can begin to suggest.

Indians think it is important to remember, while Americans believe it is important to forget.

A witty illustration or an apt story will accomplish more than columns of argument.