Quotes About Narrative

Storytelling is like sex. We all do it naturally. Some of us are better at it than others.

It's not a lie. It's a gift for fiction.

plot is not the story, but an Ariadne's thread you follow through a labyrinth of scenes.

Other people's pain is uninteresting. My own, though, is spellbinding.

Story-telling is pivotal to our well-being, as are nonethnic jokes and riddles.

We passed a gun shop advertising a Blowout Sale. While listening to a country music station,we heard a talk/song narrated by our flag. I flew proudly at Iwo Jima and the blustering deserts of Kuwait, anywhere freedom is threatened, you will find me.

Anything processed by memory is fiction.

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom.

The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing.

True or not, it's important to have stories ? they are what give us the right to walk the earth and have a name.

Douglass gave voice to the reality of social death.

David W. Blight

all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons" echoes

Above all, Douglass is remembered most for telling his personal story—the slave who willed his own freedom, mastered the master's language, saw to the core of the meaning of slavery, both for individuals and for the nation, and then captured the multiple meanings of freedom—as idea and reality, of mind and body—as perhaps no one else ever has in America.

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

Give the narrative a lighter tone than you think it deserves, dear boy, lighter than you can bear to give it because you won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope

Storytelling can heal broken hearts and damaged minds.

Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?

Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?

Full stories are as rare as honesty.

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

He wanted to meet her for the first time, over and over...He told himself the story that this was the great tragedy of his heart. The great tragedy of his heart was that it always needed to be told a story.

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy—it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.