Quotes About Narrative

What do I think about the story? he asked himself. I don't even know if we've got the right version. But no, that's not the point. The right version would presumably be true, and a legend doesn't have to be true, it has other things to do.

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls....

One resents being axed from the narrative, apart from anything else. I'd have liked to know the outcome.

To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time. Which is why all societies have sought some kind of memory bank, whether by way of folklore, story-telling, recitation of the ancestors--from Homer to Genesis. And why the heritage industry does so well today; most people may not be particularly interested in the narrative of the past, in the detail or the discussion, but they are glad to know that it is there.

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

How can you not be involved? These are your times, your world, even if those events are on the other side of it. And as for the narrative--you are a part of that, for better or for worse, whether the grey inexorable economic inevitabilities--recessions and recoveries and having less money or more--or the grand perilous global story.

None of it seemed very real, but I suppose that's the trouble with history. It's the one thing we have to make up for ourselves.

But 'if ' is not a word to use in history.

The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.

Stories always started this way, suddenly, and set within a strange world. Patience is required, to let the stories unroll. This is how people explan their lives.

This will become the story of a young woman, Karin Weinbrenner. Her story is not mine, but sometimes her story feels like the armature my life has wound itself around. I am telling it, so this story is also about me.

finally there is just one truth: the official version.

y si de pronto hablaba tanto de sí mismo, de su vida «anterior», solo lo hacía para distraer la atención de su persona.

Cuando uno está borracho, va por ahí contando su historia. El talento de un hombre equivale a la historia que vende de mesa en mesa cuando está borracho.

The words of history are also the words of war.

Texts are musical in that they take time, and the time texts take is musical time. The time of music and the time of texts always involve reaching for the next moment. Music is always moving toward the next note, and we are always reading beyond the individual word. Each sentence compels us to move forward; each paragraph carries us along to the denouement.

Great stories give us the grace of a mystical experience, on the level of the imagination.

Death. Toast. The story of our lives.

For me, all stories are fiction. The only question is: Does it rattle the soul or not?

You guys, you people, you all run on one big engine, all the same for everybody, the whole world over. Know the name of that engine? Love? she speculated. Good try but completely wrong, sorry. The name of the engine is story... If you want to get fancy, we could use the work narrative... And what does a narrative need? The presence of evil, that's what. Doity Toid and the Eel

You guys, you people, you all run on one big engine, all the same for everybody, the whole world over. Know the name of that engine? Love? she speculated. Good try, but completely wrong, sorry. The name of the engine is story...If you want to get fancy, we could use the word narrative...And what does narrative need? The presence of evil, that's what. Doity Toid and the Eel

To ask for a map is to say, "Tell me a story.

The purpose of a story or poem, unlike that of a diary, is not to record our experience but to create a context for, and to lead the reader on, a journey.

The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth.