Quotes About Narrative

So, what is my story? I don't know. It's long and twisted and not quite finished yet.

Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.

It's so often that I read for the bouncy, sunny girl men fall in love with who will solve all the romantic problems in the narrative. I don't choose to work that way.

Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story.

No one has ever been angry at another human being we're only angry at our story of them.

We reproach people for talking about themselves but it is the subject they treat best

Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.

Sometimes I think we need to tell our stories more than anyone needs to hear our stories. Maybe just so that anticipation or happiness can be reached for again. But other times it is almost as if the story itself wants repeating. So that the strand of hair caught in a kiss or the turn of a beautiful face isn't lost forever. So that, especially when it comes to beauty, we're not alone and left with the burden of remembering.

We are here. And then we are not here. For a little while, we are a story. ...layers of lived life...

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

In a country where possessions counted for everything, we had no belongings except our stories.

Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world beside our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.

When your grandchildren ask you what you did during the war, you can say, I made this movie.

To understand our fate and theirs, we must do more than tell ghost stories. We must also tell the war stories that made ghosts and made us ghosts, the war stories that brought us here.

And authenticity's important. Not that authenticity beats imagination. The story still comes first. The universality of the story has to be there. But it doesn't hurt to get the details right.

Memory and self-representation are thus inseparable, for those who represent themselves are also saying this: remember us.

It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. Any

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death. For if we are represented by others, might they not, one day, hose our deaths off memory's laminated floor?

Which was worse, my country reduced to a war or my country turned into cliché?

The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.

The Bible is about God gaining glory from both the salvation and damnation of men and angels. God demonstrates who he is, but by way of story.

Les morts font de ceux qui restent des fabricateurs de récits.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.