Quotes About Narrative

write the past in disappearing ink

Live an adventure. Live like you're in a story.

Words are too easy," he says. He opens his book. "What looks like truth and sounds like truth might be nothing but a dream, nothing but a story I wish had happened.

I am Billy Dean. This is the truth. This is my tail.

Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line?

Chapter 1 Chapter 2

and deeply seductive, storytelling tropes that you see in cinema.

Personal narrative is not simply opening up a vein and letting the blood flow toward anyone willing to stare. The historical self is created to keep dissonance at bay and render the subject palatable in the present.

Trying to look at the whole of the past is, it seems to me, like using a map of the world. No geographer would try to teach exclusively from street maps. Yet most historians teach about the past of particular nations, or even of agrarian civilizations, without ever asking what the whole of the past looks like.

It's only a story, isn't it?... Who's to say what's only a story and what's truth disguised as a story?

Some stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Other stories never end, maybe because they're alive.

He could lose himself in a story, and for a little while it might make things bearable.

So yo then man what's your story?

Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks's second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV).

anti-narrative sequences of a man (Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway.

The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more? LENORE:

Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes "it" the subject of the text. Minimalism's even worse, emptier, because it's a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there "is" no narrative consciousness in its text. This is so fucking American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

Mettiamo che Nonna mi abbia detto in maniera parecchio convincente che tutto ciò che davvero esiste della mia vita è limitato a quello che se ne può raccontare. Be', credo che non sia esattamente che la vita va raccontata anziché vissuta; è piuttosto che la vita è il suo racconto, e che in me non c'è niente che non sia o raccontato o raccontabile. Ma se è davvero così, allora che differenza c'è, perché vivere?

Infinite Jest specifically: an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them a graspable central narrative line, identifiable movement through time

And here, really, is the enigma of David Foster Wallace's work generally and Infinite Jest specifically: an endlessly, compulsively entertaining book that stingily withholds from readers the core pleasures of mainstream novelistic entertainment, among them a graspable central narrative line, identifiable movement through time, and any resolution of its quadrumvirate plotlines.

Todo ser nuevo que encontramos viene de otro relato y es el puente que une dos leyendas y dos mundos.

Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.

I long to hear the story of your life, which must captivate the ear strangely.

A happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story