Quotes About Narrative

Our descriptions are an acknowledgment of our unspoken agreement with the reader that we are not simply telling a tale but evoking an imaginary world.

It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously," Daniel Kahneman noted, "but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

The Mind is not talking to us but by means of us. Its narrative passes through us and its sorrow infuses us irrationally. As Plato discerned, there is a streak of the irrational in the World Soul.

I'm not in the novel, I am the novel

Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all

Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.

Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever.

Thou shalt not might' reach the head but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart. Also: We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them.

Lyra had to adjust to her new sense of her own story, and that couldn't be done in a day.

There is time, and there is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God.

Stories aren't made of language: they're made of something else. A little earlier I said that stories were about life; perhaps they're made of life.

Good intentions never wrote a story worth reading.

Novels and stories are not arguments; they set out not to convince, but to beguile.

Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories are just as hard as clocks to put together, and they can go wrong just as easily--as we shall soon see with Fritz's own story in a page or two. Still, Fritz was an optimist, and Karl was a pessimist, and that makes all the difference in the world.

It's important to put it like that: not "I am a writer," but rather "I write stories." If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant. Your job is to get it out on time and in good order.

Ovo je Fritz: beskoristan je, kao što vidiš. Posve neodgovoran. No, s druge strane, Fritz se samo igrao pripovjeda?a. Da je pravi majstor poput urara, znao bi kako svaki ?in ima svoju posljedicu. Iza svakog tik slijedi tak. Iza re?enice - Bio jednom... - mora slijediti pri?a, ina?e ?e slijediti nešto drugo, a to može biti puno opasnije od pri?e.

here am I, my hands red with blood and shame and wet with tears, longing to begin telling the story of Jesus, and not just for the sake of making a record of what happened: I want to play with it; I want to give it a better shape; I want to knot the details together neatly to make patterns and show correspondences, and if they weren't there in life, I want to put them there in the story, for no other reason than to make a better story.

When you write a story you're not trying to prove anything or demonstrate the merits of this case or the flaws in that. At its simplest, what you're doing is making up some interesting events, putting them in the best order to show the connections between them and recounting them as clearly as you can.

I was sure that I was going to write stories myself when I grew up. It's important to put it like that - not I am a writer, but rather I write stories. If you put the emphasis on yourself rather than your work, you're in danger of thinking that you're the most important thing. But you're not. The story is what matters, and you're only the servant, and your job is to get it out on time and in good order.

In Malcolm's view the story was almost insufferable

Lyra remembered her visit to his house

Algunas historias son así. Cuando se les ha dado cuerda, nada las detiene; avanzan hasta alcanzar el final previsto. Aunque los personajes deseen con todas sus fuerzas modificar su destino, son incapaces de hacerlo.

Tell them stories

Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well. Just tell them stories.