Quotes About Narrative

This is fictional time, where events play out and possibilities are exhausted, so that meaning can emerge.

A story is entirely determined by what portion of time it chooses to narrate.

Length is weight in fiction, pretty much.

Obviously, I had talked too much, recounted too long a list. By that gauge, the years since puberty were peaks and valleys and stretches of incoherent landscape.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

Remember, it's the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings.

But stories are worlds. New worlds for us to visit. In stories, we live forever.

Porque um contador de histórias não morre nunca, mantém-se sempre vivo nas suas histórias enquanto houver álguem para as ouvir.

For a teller of tales will never die, but will live on in stories - for as long as there are folk to listen.

The reader wants to be immersed in a story, not drowned in words

A história de toda a gente começa a meio da de outra pessoa, com meadas confusas de narrativa à espera de serem desenroladas. E de quem é esta história afinal?

I happen to know that history is nothing but a spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.

Sometimes I think that maybe we are just stories. Like we may as well just be words on a page, because we're only what we've done and what we are going to do.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?

Just so you know, when they say Once upon a time" . . . they're lying

There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.

Once you call something a story, it's set in stone. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that can't be transformed, because by definition, if you do that, it's not the same story anymore

Just so you know, when they say once upon a time....they're lying. It's not once upon a time. Its not even twice upon a time. It's hundreds of times, over and over, every time someone opens up the pages of this dusty old book.

You can't be real, Delilah murmurs. Says who? I ask. Did you really think that a story exists only when you're reading it?

no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it Ã¢â'¬Â¦ some stories just don't have a happy ending.

There is a reason history has, at its heart, the narrative of one's life.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

We all have stories we tell ourselves, until we believe them to be true.