Quotes About Narrative

Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.

Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey.

Through inhabiting the Christian narrative, we come to see ourselves, as the medieval writer Julian of Norwich famously put it, as being enfolded in the love of Christ, which brings us a new security, identity, and value. Our self-worth is grounded in being loved by God.

I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sand. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it's most important when it's negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other.

TEKELI-LI. Tekeli-li, Tekeli-li. I got that from Pym. I got that from Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe, specifically. Pym that is maddening, Pym that is brilliance, Pym whose failures entice instead of repel. Pym that flows and ignites and Pym that becomes so entrenched it stagnates for hundreds of words at a time. A book that at points makes no sense, gets wrong both history and science, and yet stumbles into an emotional truth greater than both.

And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In

la historia la escriben los vencedores y los vencedores, con el tiempo, adquieren el poder de obligarnos a creer lo que escribieron, de hacernos olvidar lo que no se escribió y de inducirnos a tener miedo de lo que jamás ocurrió.

Your big word isn't the content of your life, it is the context of your life.

I didn't lie, I was writing fiction with my mouth." Homer Simpson

To be human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

It's okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That's the one with a story.

And my life — and my mess of a mind — needed shape. I had 'lost the plot'. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive.

To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.

That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can't be tamed.

As you're creating your story, think through where you'd want pauses. Try to put yourself in the listener's shoes–if you were the listener and you were being told your story, where would you want pauses?

how to keep the audience engaged and entertained throughout the story. No matter how well you have prepared for it, you can still encounter problems. You

We've all heard stories that have been pointless but still kept us engaged and excited because of the person's body language and voice qualities. Afterward

Stories are always best when the story has a bottom line or point, or a comedic punchline, or a lesson to be learned; if there is no point,  the story might not be worth telling. People will usually look for the bottom line or purpose of why the story was told in the first place.

America is no longer a country that cares about experts. In fact, it hates experts. If you can't fit a story into the culture-war storyline in ten seconds or less, it dies.

By February 2016, when Trump was already steaming toward the nomination, I began to realize the extent to which he'd conned all of us. He first used the media's financial desperation to secure free coverage, but when the attention became not just negative but condemnatory, he used that, too. He

On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.

Stories are how we stand in the presence of mystery.

Isak Dinesen wrote, "There is no mystery in art. Do the things you can see, they will show you what you cannot see." In other words, there is mystery in art, but one of the ways it is conjured occurs when an author lavishes narrative attention on the visible.

We are all always the heroes of our stories, or the villains--we never play a bit part. [Édouard Manet]