Quotes About Narrative

People love dogs. You can never go wrong adding a dog to the story.

We're all the hero of our own story.

In every person there lies a book that can be enjoyed by others only by escaping through the lips or finger tips." - Jim Conover - 2000

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It's just too bad.

Without desire how is it possible to make a story?

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative

We tell each other stories in order to live.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very mysterious. It's a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don't do it would ever believe.

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. –Joan Didion

I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.

The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities.

We love New York, the narrative promises, because it matches our energy level.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be "interesting" to know which.

we tell ourselves stories in order to live..

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

people whose names would tell a different story, although not necessarily to a different hundred people.

History is context.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which we've learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means.