Quotes About Narrative

We sit and listen and are enthralled anew, for good stories, it seems, never lose their magic.

My dad knows how to tell a story. He'd make me laugh by doing all the different voices.

The story you think you know is never the real one.

I wanted her and no one else to tell me the story of how she died.

I thought about words and how, if you put a few of them in the right order, a three-minute story about a girl and her dog can get people to forget all the ways you've disappointed them.

Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.

But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She

But don't you think there are larger issues the author is trying to explore?' 'Yes, but they shouldn't be given primacy over or even separated from the experience of the story itself.

But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She wanted his real one. What would he say about it all? She could imagine writing a whole book on him alone.

I would then like to know how it comes about that when each piece of a story is true, the whole story turns out to be false?

we still expect a biography to give an account of a person's life, and times too.

all anybody is doing when engaging in life writing is giving a narrative shape to a story of a life.

hunting down those moments that unintentionally tip the reader out of the dream.

withholding it and disclosing it. The writer is always doing one or the other – either keeping things unknown or drip-feeding the reader with details.

And in the end, we are all just stories

Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb to your deathbed.

How can life end in the middle of the story? Because life always does.

the past/that has a place for us will know us by our scattered wake." A History Play, Waterborne

I have never talked to anyone about that night. Ever...' she said. 'And now when I listen to my own words, I realise that they tell a different story from the one I have carried all these years.' The old woman closed her eyes. 'I think that if we can find the words, and if we can find someone to tell them to, then perhaps we can see things differently. But I had no words, and I had nobody.

Every story has another story inside, but you don't usually get to read the inside one. It's deleted or torn up or maybe filed away before the story becomes a book ...

We each have a story to tell, I know; so let each one take his turn.

Whether or not this story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl.

I think that we want to be led slightly astray when we're being told a story. Just a little wrong footed.

You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.