Quotes About Narrative

We have lived! Our moments are important. This is what it is to be a writer: to be the carrier of details that make up history.

I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

Before the war, they were happy, he said, quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed, and better off under a master's care. I watched the words blur on the page. No one raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.

Rick's dream, though he seldom described it as such, was to someday tell a story so good that the people who heard it simply wouldn't want to kill wolves anymore.

but the watchers knew their story

There's a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up - or didn't - and Jamaican stories.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales

Ich meine damit eine Geschichte. Aber nicht irgendeine Geschichte. Ich denke an große Erzählungen – Erzählungen, die tief und komplex genug sind, um Erklärungen hinsichtlich der Herkunft und der Zukunft eines Volkes zu bieten; Erzählungen, die Ideale aufstellen, Verhaltungsregeln vorgeben, die Quellen von Autorität benennen und durch all dies eine Dimension von Kontinuität und Sinnhaftigkeit erzeugen.

Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.

The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry--is not even a "subject"--but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.

Zoals we het verleden nu beschrijven was het niet, en zoals het was zullen we het niet kunnen beschrijven.

LGBT history is written, like most history, by the victors, those with the means and those with connections to power.

The Whites told only one side. Told it to please themselves. Told much that is not true. Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the Indians, has the white man told

We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn't endure the certainty of suffering.

To begin you must be traced into the landscape, your people and your place found. Until they are you are in the wrong story.

I answered Annie's questions about the day outside, about where the electricity crews were, and about myself, which last made dawn on me that it's only when someone asks you about yourself that you exist in the fourth dimension of a story.

Dad moved in with the baffled deepsea shyness of a character just arriving in a story already underway.

I think maybe I had a first sense then of the power of story, and realised that time had done what Time sometimes does to hardship, turn it into fairy tale.

The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.

Noi siamo la nostra storia, la raccontiamo per rimanere vivi o mantenere in vita quelli che raccontiamo

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.