Quotes About Narrative

There is a great deal of solemn discussion about The Novel. In fact, every novel is an answer to the ancient plea, 'Tell us a story.

If you and I can learn to tell our stories—not necessarily in writing but in talking about them, in daily living and in worship—we will affect our world in ways that only eternity will tell.

I've learned in my travels not to ask too many questions. It's better to talk about yourself. Offer something of yourself and your own story so that the dialogue turns into a bartering of firsts.

The people who hurt you don't get the last word. You get to tell the story of you, and your story has more power than you can imagine.

I took my cue from Mom and stuck to that story. I was happy to cast her and Dad as vigilant, fully present parents. That's who they wanted to be. That's who they are: the parents who would go to the ends of the earth for their children. Only in my case, they went to the wrong end.

Rightly understood, a myth is an effort to tell truths that cannot be told with mere facts or known by the senses and the mind alone, truths that take form only in that integrative place called the heart.

Le romancier est le seul menteur qui ne tait pas le fait qu'il ment.

El tamiz de los cuentos es el ojo de la cerradura.

Top-down cortically mediated techniques typically use cognition to regulate affect and sensorimotor experience, focusing on meaning making and understanding. The entry point is the story, and the formulation of a coherent narrative is of prime importance. A linguistic sense of self is fostered this process, and experience changes through understanding

History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers. Africa will write her own history and it will be a history of glory and dignity.

There are stories that don't need a plot. Sooner or later they rise above the confusion and untangle their mysteries in a series of sentences.

You'd tell the world what your best friend wore to sleep if you thought it made a good enough story.

Tell the story you want to tell, and let it be as long as it needs to be. Worry about marketing it later.

To a narrative therapist, there are few interactions between couples that are not influenced by patriarchy. If there is an abuse of power in a relationship, a narrative therapist would view the responsibility for the abuse of power as lying in the hands of the person abusing the power. A narrative approach would invite the abuser to Recognize the abuse as abuse. Position himself against it. Accept total responsibility for stopping it.

We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

The passion for the story is the wind in your narrative sails. Begin at the heart. We must hear the heartbeat of the story. Love your characters into existence.

Fact and fiction are different truths.

In a story, you must always listen for the voice you cannot hear, the one that has been ignored or silenced. In that crushed voice, there is a strain of truth, as a crushed grape yields a drop of wine.

Through Christ, their history becomes our history; we are engrafted into the Bible's ongoing chronology. The Hebrew Scriptures become our own family narrative. The history of the Bible and the history of the Church form a single story, of which our lives—and our worship—are an integral part.

The 1:1:1 method can be summed up as starting a story as close to the end as possible. Most stories end before they get to the end, in terms of impact on the listener, their attention span, and the energy that you have to tell it.

every story has a purpose and point, and it's almost always about how they were made to feel.

Great storytelling and improv are all about setting the right framework with intimate details and telling the story that gets the right emotional payoffs from the crowd.

Effective storytelling is all about being as specific as you can and being as detailed as you can.