Quotes About Narrative

Who holds the ultimate responsibility for the story? The writer or the reader, the reader or the writer . . .

Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one.

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true. They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror.

Few pleasures are as basic and satisfying as hearing a good story-unless it's the pleasure of writing one.

I'm the Beast. You're the Beauty," he said. "It's all a story, isn't it?

You have a low opinion of yourself, Helen." "I wasn't born with it." "Where did you get it?" 'The story" she said, "is too long to tell, and too dull to listen to.

When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them.

THE main thing to remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is not to let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story. This adventure is mine, Albert Campion's, and I am fairly certain that I was pretty nearly brilliant in it in spite of the fact that I so nearly got myself and old Lugg killed that I hear a harp quintet whenever I consider it.

Different versions of a true story

Such is the amazing power of stories to link us to our past and lead us all the way back to the present.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.

What a pity, when Christopher Colombus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

The pleasure of this kind of narrative is not that we think we are reading about the real world (although the story usually does map onto our world fairly closely), but rather that the wings of symmetry are unfolding around us; briefly we are on a planet where, as E.M. Forster says, there are no secrets and human behavior makes sense. I call this 'fiction.

I'm most interested in working and learning from different people and telling good stories.

On this view, our identities acquire depth and vitality not from any innate kernel of being, but from a gradual layering of stories. This in turn implies that the most current story that we tell about ourselves is merely the most recent draft of our life.

It has been somewhere said by Johnson, that merely to invent a story is no small effort of the human understanding.

CASTLE RACKRENT Monday Morning.[A]

Storytelling draws on the magic of language to created Elsewheres. Writers use a linguistic sleight-of-hand to take an attribute, attach them to new objects, and create enchantment.

Fritz had an older sister that he'd never thought to mention, and that his story about having had a terrible childhood that kept him from talking about his family was, as Barney had stated, bull.

Julen i Hamsund hadde han fortalt meg om. Der var ikke noe juletre, men det var lys i en stake. Og alle fikk spise seg mette i Guds navn.

The exercise of the imagination is the training ground of compassion. Stories educate the heart. Stories, like poetry, are related to prayer.

Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.