Quotes About Narrative

La vida no es más que una sombra en marcha; un mal actor que se pavonea y se agita una hora en el escenario y después no vuelve a ser oído: es un cuento narrado por un idiota, lleno de ruido y de furia, que nada significa

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

All we can do is keep telling the stories, hoping that someone will ear. Hoping that in the noisy echoing nightmare of endlessly breaking news and celebrity gossip, other voices might be heard, speaking of the life of the mind and the soul's journey.

Buscar sinceridad en unas memorias carece de sentido. Mejor sería preguntarse qué versión de uno mismo y del mundo ha escogido el autor, dado que siempre hay posibilidad de elegir.

In prose... at any moment the door will open, someone will enter, something will happen. In poetry, the description itself must happen.

All truth is fiction, really, for the teller tells it as he sees it, and it might be different from some other teller.

And don't imagine for a second when Dylan recites her narrative of abuse or watching the train go 'round, that I'm accusing her of deliberately lying. Like several doctors I have spoken to about this awful story, I am convinced she believes what was suggested to her and drummed into her for so many years. She and her brother Satchel were innocent kids, with Dylan particularly vulnerable. As one former prosecutor stated, doing this to her is the real crime.

If you walk across my camera I will flash the world your story.

Si fuera campeón [...] ni inventaría historias porque entonces la historia sería yo.

The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths.

I can only tell my story, what you believe is up to you.

The world isn't just the way it is. It's how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?

The word isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

The holy word is story, and story is the holy word.

So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals of the story without animals?

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

Then the elderly man said, "I have a story that will make you believe in God.

The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?