Quotes About Narrative

As an actor, you always want to feel like what you're doing is making a difference to the story.

You can't make a movie about making movies - it's boring.

The simple, sweet films without the star power often manage to tell a better story.

The film-school mantra is that if you don't tell your own stories, nobody will.

When I say narrative, I do not mean simply the plot, I mean considerably more. Plots and their shapes--the bare outlines of stories--were something I know J.R.R. Tolkien himself was interested in. When I was an undergraduate, I went to a course of lectures he gave on the subject--at least, I think that was the subject, because Tolkien was all but inaudible. He evidently hated lecturing, and I suspect he also hated giving his thoughts away.

People kept coming up to her all day, saying, "Is it true what Nina says—you come from a broken home?" "Broken right in half," Polly replied to each one. "There's a hole in the middle where the garden is. You get rained on trying togo upstairs." (p. 154)

There goes Mig with her happy endings again, Chris said. But I don't care. I like happy endings. And I asked Chris why something should be truer just because it's unhappy. He couldn't answer.

You can't alter the past. The only thing you can alter is the future. People write stories pretending you can alter the past, but it can't be done. All you can do to the past is remember it wrong or interpret it differently, and that's no good to us.

Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education is not 'broken.' Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it.

A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.

There must be more to stories than you think.

A curtain was drawn back in every man's inner theater and their storytelling minds got to work.

Joe the storyteller was remembered at the Swan for a long, long time. And though eventually there came a day when the man himself was forgotten, his stories lived on.

Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words.

My story - my own personal story - ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in the time since everything finished.

Miss Lea, it doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story.

It doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story. They come and go, and when they go, they're gone for good.

disregarded, by the wayside. It never failed. A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

When the time was right he would run away—and be part of the story.

Las historias necesitan palabras. Sin ellas palidecen, enferman y mueren. Y luego te persiguen.

remembered the words of the man in the brown suit, and how they had echoed around the rafters of my rooms under the eaves. Yet the man in the brown suit was a figment of her imagination. I should have expected it. She was a spinner of yarns, wasn't she? A storyteller. A fabulist. A liar. And the plea that had so moved me—Tell me the truth—had been uttered by a man who was not even real. I was at a loss to explain to myself the bitterness of my disappointment.

Miss Lea, it does not do to get attached to these secondary characters It's not their story. They come, they go, and when they go they're gone for good. That's all there is to it.

Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story.