Quotes About Narrative

every story written is marks upon a page The same marks, repeated, only differently arranged

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

In the Far West there is one thing which is more fabulously valuable then gold, even. And that is a story, whether it be truth or good, true-sounding fiction. Stories

It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.

In den Glasperlen des Märchens spiegelt sich die Welt.

We can't just say, "This pen is great, and consumers should buy it!" We ought to wrap up this message and create not only a convincing, but an interesting story around it. Here I am, improvising on the spot: A lady dropped her pen in the street, it was raining heavily, and a gentleman picked it up and said, "May I have your number?"

The difference between mad people and sane people . . . is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.

A story can take you through a whole process of searching, seeking, confronting, through conflicts, and then to a resolution. As the storyteller and the listener, we go through a story together.

In my opinion, this school and its contemporaries were nothing more than cheap merchants of social status, selling an inflated sense of self-worth to middle-class boys of no particular merit. I will, however, grant them something. Without the first school, I would not have ended up at the second. Without the second, I would not have attended St Oswald's. Without St Oswald's, I would not have met Finn. Without Finn, there would be no story.

When I finally got to sleep I found Edmond and told him everything that happened, and he stayed with me for hours and whether I was dreaming or just borderline schizophrenic I didn't know and didn't care either. At

Sometimes it's easier to tell ourselves a story.

The voice. It doesn't just matter what you say. It matters who does the saying. It matters whose voice it is.

It's that powerful, this thing we share. A murky history, its narrative near impenetrable. We keep telling it to ourselves, noting its twists and turns, trying to make sense of it. And hiding it from everyone else.

All of this is fiction And all of it is true

The tales we tell ourselves about ourselves make us who we are.

History is written by the victors, which is certainly true, but it's also written by the wealthy and the literate.

The truth is often so much more complicated than the digest version that's handed down to us.

But it's the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments.

To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear—because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need. My own illness story has no destination.

Without answers, at my most desperate, I came to feel (in some unarticulated way) that if I could just tell the right story about what was happening, I could make myself better. If only I could figure out what the story was, like the child in a fantasy novel who must discover her secret name, I could become myself again.

My narrative is not a neat one. Which version of the story of my illness I tell depends on what month, what day, even what hour I do so, and whether my symptoms are in the background or the foreground.

You list the dead. You tell the stories of the past. You write about the catastrophes and the massacres. What about the living, Finnikin? Who honors them?

People aren't interested in the truth, Dafar. They're interested in what keeps them safe. They're interested in being looked after. They're interested in a tale being spun... Mighty men have moments of great despair that common people do not want to know about.