Quotes About Narrative

Toda obra, toda novela, narra a través de la trama de los acontecimientos la historia de su propia creación, su propia historia.

Missglückte Lebensgeschichten zu erzählen, anderen die Schuld zuzuschieben, die "Mängel aufzuzeigen", ist allemal leichter, als mühsame, aber erfolgreiche Werdegänge darzustellen, ohne in die Nähe von Kitsch zu geraten.

To survive, you must tell stories.

A novel is a piece of prose of a certain length with something wrong with it.

But couldn't he burn the twaddle instead of straining it. The story of the man who uses a Bunsen burner to singe from his lips the words with which a story might otherwise have been told.

Now the purpose of her stories had changed. She spun them to discover their meaning. In the telling, she found, you reached a point where you could not go back, where—as the stories changed—it transformed you, too.

With the stories of people she'd known since her childhood it was like that: one incident in their lives might come to an ending, but others would lead into new veins, and what was fascinating was to look at the whole of it and discern a pattern, a way of being, that had shaped those passages.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

I come from a set of storytellers and moralists…. The storytellers were forever changing the tale and the moralists tampering with it in order to put it in an edifying light.

Let us keep ever in our minds the fact that it is the Ramayana and the Mahabharata that bind our vast numbers together as one people, despite caste, space and language that seemingly divide them.

A poet, Hephaestion, sings not to narrate human events as they occur, but to make sure that we have the opportunity of living the emotions and the passions of our heroes even at a distance of centuries.

It was definitely a part of our life. I mean, my mom had both her brothers and her fiancee in Vietnam at the same time, so it wasn't just my dad's story, it was my mom's story too. And we definitely grew up listening to the stories.

Our lives are fictions, a work we leave behind, signed.

The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it.

I'll tell you a secret. Old storytellers never die. They disappear into their own story.

I tell the story to you now, but in each telling the story itself changes a little, changes direction, and that in turn changes you and me. So be very careful not only in how you repeat it but in how you remember it, goslings. More often than you realize it, the world is shaped by two things -- stories told and the memories they leave behind.

Every story needs to be worth telling.

There is only Love -- and Stories. All else is but a shadow dream.

The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning. The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.

People clamor to tell their stories in words. This doesn't make them writers, Nor does it make their stories matter.

Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.

That while I wanted to write with the narrative bravado of Toni Morrison, it might be okay if I started with something less ambitious than a book like beloved.

A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.

An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.