Quotes About Narrative

People don't write their own endings'" he said. "Well, I'm planning on writing mine.

WE all need a story of where we came from and how we got here.

Me parecía que era necesario salvar con las palabras todo lo que la historia, la Historia grande, es decir, la de los hombres, había hecho impreciso, había condenado o idealizado [con respecto a las mujeres].

History is alwys written by victors, and the defeated create a new set of myths to explain the past and gild the future

Yaran?n ç?pla??na vurulmaz. Anlatmaya soyunanlar buna güvenir. Giyinik yaralarla yazanlar?n, anlatanlar?n hikayelerindeyse bizi inand?rmayan bir ?eyler vard?r. Sonra yara kilitleri. Kimilerinin ilk yaras? kendinin kilidi olur; bir daha aç?lmaz. Yaras?n?n fark?nda bile olmadan ya?ayanlar?nsa anlatmaya, dinlemeye de?er hiçbir hikayeleri yoktur, onlar?n düzayak mutluluklar? vard?r; kolay sevinçleri.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

The universe is not made of atoms; it's made of stories.

Half of writing history is hiding the truth.

Historians have their pens ready to begin a new chapter in history.

Since history is just an abstract word, and the land the concrete part, the credit will be given to the land.

The famous rocks of David and Goliath have been transformed into rocket combats between Arabs and Jews.

In the Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, the reader tries to reconstruct the past through participants and witnesses to that past, but what results is a blurred, ambiguous fiction within another fiction that recounts past events in accord with individual perspectives and interests. In this case, reality becomes fiction not only because the novelist fictionalized it but because the acts of remembering are so deformed or willfully mendacious that it is itself a fiction.

The dream becomes a story, a myth. . . . And the story becomes a dream.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Scripture trains us to listen to and learn from stories of all kinds, inside the sacred text and outside, and to discern patterns and meanings within them. Stories of all sorts form and shape the character of those who read them. We live within the narrative as creatures in search of an ending, in search of happiness.

The author extols the power of having significant portions of God's Word read in public worship with the following analogy. He says that by reading a few short verses, we are like someone glimpsing nature through window from across the room. But by taking in more lengthy passages of Scripture, we are like someone who, intrigue, gets right next to the window to take in more of the view that it offers, basking in more of the arc of the whole the whole narrative.

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

The Bible is the story so far in the true novel that God is still writing.

The meaning of the story is found in every detail, as well as in the broad narrative. The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. The sorrow of heaven joined with the anguish of earth; the forgiving love stored up in God's future was poured out into the present; the voices that echo in a million human hearts, crying for justice, longing for spirituality, eager for relationship, yearning for beauty, drew themselves together into a final scream of desolation.

It has forgotten that the gospels are replete with atonement theology, through and through—only they give it to us not as a neat little system, but as a powerful, sprawling, many-sided, richly revelatory narrative in which we are invited to find ourselves, or rather to lose ourselves and to be found again the other side.

only when we see Jesus's death in its proper connection to this entire narrative, can we begin to resolve the questions we want to ask about what the early Christians actually meant.

History is not just about events, but about motivations. Motivations, no doubt, float like icebergs, with much more out of sight than above the waterline. But there is often a good deal visible above the water, often including a strong implicit narrative. We can study that.

You cannot rescue someone from the scars of an abusive upbringing by replaying the same narrative on a cosmic scale and mouthing the word "love" as you do so.

Unless we are constantly aware, in reading the gospels, that they are telling the Jesus story in such a way as to bring out the Israel story, we will never hear their proper harmony.