Quotes About Narrative

My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character." -- William H. Gass, "Finding a Form

The purpose of an imaginative narrative isn't to confirm what we think we already know about reality; rather, it offers "a record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of language." A fictional cat may reflect qualities of a real cat, but it is better appreciated as a product of the author's agile mind.

For those who chose to build off modernism, fiction became a field for radical explorations in narrative form and voice. Writers set out in search of new techniques that could serve as sources of discovery and offer unique opportunities for amplifying the potential meaning of their subject matter.

sentimentality makes ministry impossible. If the ministry is reduced to being primarily a helping profession then those who take up that office cannot help being destroyed if they have any integrity. For they will find themselves frustrated by a people not trained on the narrative of God's salvation, not trained to want the right things rightly, but rather a people who share the liberal presumption that all needs which are sincerely felt are legitimate.

To be a Christian means gradually, Sunday after Sunday, to be subsumed into another story, a different account of where we have come from and where we are going, a story that is called "gospel." You are properly called a "Christian" when it's obvious that the story told in Scripture is your story, above all other stories that the world tries to impose on you, and that the God who is rendered in Scripture is the God who has got you.

Psychologist Richard Gerrig defines a narrative as a device that temporarily mentally transports the listener or reader away from their immediate surroundings; when it ends, they return to their surroundings "somewhat changed by the journey.

a high degree of narrative transportation impairs one's critical facilities.

If you want to convince someone, target their System 1 with narrative, not their System 2 with facts and data.

I liked all their lies best, for I think they are the brightest part of anybody's history.

But I believe if you tell a story, it's like sending a nightingale into the air with the hope that its song will never be forgotten.

We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.

In every good tale there is a seed of truth, and from that seed a lovely story grows. Some of what I've told you is true and some . . . well, let's just call it the bloom on the rosebush.

good things are made even better when you share the story of how they came to be.

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.

We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.

There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.

The picture is a flash of color stories. No one can imagine a picture that has no story.

Another historian, Molly Greene, wearily describes the decline thesis as a meat-grinder, which converts all the facts into the homogenised elements of a single story rather than the distinct indicators of many different stories.

Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending on their childhood.

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

Even if I had amazing recall, and I don't, recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that cannot be swallowed, but other "memories" are just redemption myths writ small. 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.

Memory becomes not a faculty but a coconspirator, a tool for constructing the self that we show the world.