Quotes About Narrative

Margaret Lea." "The biographer.

How horribly dull. I could never have been a biographer. Don't you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?" "Not in the stories you have told the world so far.

The storyteller gave me a sideways look. Miss Lea, it doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story. They come and go, and when they're gone, they're gone for good. That is all there is to it.

I'm a storyteller." "I am a biographer.

Don't you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?

Diane Setterfield

El silencio no es el entorno natural para las historias -me dijo en una ocasión la señorita Winter-. Las historias necesitan palabras. Sin ellas palidecen, enferman y mueren. Y luego te persiguen.

No conviene encariñarse con los personajes secundarios. No es su historia. Vienen, se van, y una vez que se han ido ya no vuelven. Eso es todo.

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.

Six months ago a miraculous story had burst wildly and messily into the Swan; today it was neatened, pressed, and put away without a crease in it.

My objective, now as before, is to do to the new Nazi paradigm what my previous book did to the old race narrative, namely, blow it out of the water. Here I refute their bogus narrative, expose their big lie, and pin the Nazi tail precisely where it belongs—on the Democratic donkey.

In this bogus narrative, Republicans are the bad guys because Republicans opposed the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. For progressive Democrats, the Civil Rights Movement is the canonical event of American history. It is even more important than the American Revolution. Progressive reasoning is: We did this, so it must be the greatest thing that was ever done in America. Republicans opposed it, which makes them the bad guys.

BLAMING THE SOUTH Today's Democrats try to shift blame from themselves by blaming "the South." The South is supposedly responsible for espousing racist views and implementing racist practices. Yet the detractors of the South neglect to point out that after Reconstruction, the Democratic Party was the dominant, almost the sole, political party in the South.

In the progressive narrative, America is to blame, and the first offenders were the Founders themselves. The progressive conclusion is that the founding was "defective," setting up the progressive agenda to replace and move away from founding principles, what Obama called the "remaking" of America.

My job is not to just set down events that happened to me. My job is to create an experience for a reader." —Mary Karr

Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.

Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.

In committing a work to memory we make it safe from decay. It stands untouched. Children memorize parts of stories their parents tell them. They want the same story again and again. Don't change a word or they get terribly upset. This is the unchanged narrative every culture needs in order to survive.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.

This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them.

Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God. He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the whole shapeless narrative of his unraveling.