Quotes About Narrative

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. But what happens when those details crumble?

It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world--sights, sounds, smells--into coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past. But what happens when those details crumble? Hailstones on a tin roof....What happens when your life can't be translated into a linear narrative?

Warhol, who understood the idea that the self was just a story we told. Reinvention

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have the potential to be comic stories the next.

Vera said: "Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?" So I told her why. Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.

All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell," he says, and he is talking as if he is talking only to me. "Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.

But really, if you ask me, there is only one kid of plot. One. Stuff happens. That's it.

Because there is a need to hear one story and to tell another.

All we are, all we can be, are the stories we tell. Long after we are gone, our words will be all that is left, and who is to say what really happened or even what reality is? Our stories, our fiction, our words will be as close to truth as can be. And no one can take that away from you.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

The story of loss and regaining of identity is the framework, I think, of all literature

If the general shape and structure of the story is prescribed in advance, then—this is our second critical principle—all the literary merits of the story, the wit in the dialogue, the liveliness of the characterization, and the like, are a technical tour de force. They illustrate the author's rhetorical skill in working within his conventions.

Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us.

Ayn? masallar? dinlemelerine ra?men ötekiler hiç böyle bir ?ey ya?amad?lar.

Stories are wonderful, enjoyable, and scrumptious things. In the old days, they were served on thin plates called pages. You ate them with your eyes. And they didn't go down to your tummy, like normal food. No, they went into a dream machine inside your head.

The pursuit of truth, not of facts, is the business of fiction.

Good stories are good stories, no matter how they're categorized.

There was an English major. He wanted to be a writer and tell our story from the inside—which had only been done thirty or forty times before.

I told as much of the truth as I could.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

Remember this: a story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth's debt to a story.

a story that must be told never forgives silence

A story that must be told never forgives silence. Speech is the mouth's debt to a story

Someday he would write his memoirs, when his adventures had arranged themselves into a suitably attractive package.