Quotes About Narrative

it would seem almost impossible to argue that the biblical narrative is a calm, clear, and uncontentious text. Rather, the Scriptures reach our ears in an often ominous and scandalous tone. From the opening pages of this ancient text, we are confronted with a shocking series of ambiguous stories and complex conflicts that defy easy categorization and interpretation.

For the Word, if it exists at all, does not simply dwell in the ink that marks the pages of the Bible and cannot be isolated in a dissection of the story into its constituent parts.

She thought, instead, with longing of more books—of buying books—of slipping into a narrative of other people's lives. That was release.

I have been sometimes way too attracted by my own villains because in a way they seem to hold the secret to the heart of the narrative.

I quote Frank O'Connor to my students: that when you are writing a story, at some point the story must take over. You are not going to be able to control it. I think this is true. O'Connor said he thought Joyce controls his stories too tightly—"Whoever heard of a Joyce story taking over?" he asked—and that there is a deadness about them. You have got to keep the story opened up, let the story take over at some point.

Per combattere realmente il silenzio della tua morte, devo raccontare la tua storia, non la mia

Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

I wouldn't say we lived in a tough neighborhood, but when I was growing up we still called a story with a happy ending an alibi.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.

The small lives of women don't make for good stories. That's why there were no girls in the stories Myrddin told, unless they were there as a prize for the hero to win at the end of his adventures.

That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.

Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species of mythology.

The duty of the historian is not to make the facts, but to discover them, and then to construct his theory wide enough to give them all comfortable room.

He cometh unto you with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.

I am not I; pity the tale of me.

À ceux-là, en général, j'explique que la vraisemblance importe plus que la vérité, que la justesse compte davantage que l'exactitude et surtout qu'un lieu, ce n'est pas une topographie mais la manière dont on le raconte, pas une photographie mais une sensation, une impression.

Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

Part of the storytelling ability is simply the anticipation of boredom.

Actually everybody has a story, a fairy tale in their heart that they adhere to.

The title of the work, its place in the collective library, the nature of the person who tells us about it, the atmosphere established in the written or spoken exhange, among many other instances, offer alternatives to the book itself that allow us to talk about ourselves without dwelling upon the work too closely.

et de son Å"uvre que par le fait de le constituer en personnage mémorable, digne du récit historique, à la

Whatever film it is, the geography has to be right. If I cannot establish it, I'll get lost. I wouldn't even understand it in the first place! I hence visit a place and decide what can be conveyed from where; how that can be incorporated in the story.