Quotes About Narrative

An inclusive narrative structure provides the executive brain with the best template and strategy for the oversight and coordination of the functions of mind. A story well told, containing conflicts and resolutions, gestures and expressions, and thoughts flavored with emotion, connects people ad integrates neural networks

History is the propaganda of the victors.

If you have a simply swell story in mind, you can forget the rules. A swell story takes care of itself.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

But they both knew that words were weapons too, and when fashioned into a story their power was almost limitless.

history wasn't just written by the victors. First it had to be erased and rewritten. Replacing troublesome truth with self-serving myth.

Beauvoir reported first between bites of a ham sandwich, made with thick-sliced ham carved from what must have been a maple-cured roast, with honey-mustard sauce and slabs of aged cheddar on a fresh croissant.

All autobiographies are alibi-ographies.

I love houses, all the things they tell me, so that's one reason. I don't mind working as a cleaning woman. It's just like reading a book.

Ma wrote true stories; not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes. Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished, and edited to the extent that I'm not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn't matter: the story is the thing.

The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid

Anch'io, pertanto, mi impegnai, per civetteria, a lasciare qualcosa di mio ai posteri [...]; e visto che non avevo a disposizione fatti veri da raccontare —perché purtroppo non mi era mai successo niente di interessante— mi decisi a dire le bugie, ma bugie che si potessero riconoscere molto meglio di quelle che dicono gli altri: perché, infatti, almeno su un punto dirò la verità, se dichiaro che sto mentendo! (Storia vera, I, 4)

they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

This is all for me to tell of the war, and of our after hardships. The story will be for people who come after us. For them to see, to know what was done here. Reasons for the war, never before told. Nobody to help us tell our side -- the whites told only one side. Told it to please themselves. Told much that is not true. Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the Indians, has the white man told.

Every writer is the amanuensis to their characters

A myth is 'a narrative involving supernatural or fancied persons embodying popular ideas or social phenomena.' Women love telling stories . . . the girl-group is a gigantic narrative full of morality tales locked up like charms in a crystallized sound.

Popular music creates most impact in the telling of stories.

She can raise from the tomb those of whom she speaks or writes, and make them live forever.

it's quite difficult to know who owns a story. Is it the writer, who crafted it? The characters, who carry the plot forward? Or you, the reader, who breathes life into them? Or perhaps none of the three can exist without the other. Perhaps without this magical combination, a story would be nothing more than words on a page.

For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.

A long time ago someone told me that a story will tell itself, when it's ready.

Just so you know, I begin, when they say 'Once upon a time'... they're lying. It's not once upon a time. It's 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 will ask me, after this, why, I didn't tell you this before. It is because I know how powerful a story can be. It can change the course of history. It can save a life. But it can also be a sinkhole, a quicksand in which you become stuck, unable to write yourself free.

This time of night, the sky was flung wide open, stars spread like a story across the horizon.