Quotes About Narrative

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on a wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.

Not every place has a story

History, of course, is never real. People either glorify it or horrify it. Or at the very least color it.

Talvez seja este o sentido mais exato da alfabetização: aprender a escrever a sua vida como autor e como testemunha de sua história, isto é, biografar-se, existenciar-se, historicizar-se.

I'll tell you a secret about storytelling. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty... were not perfect in the beginning. It's only a happy ending on the last page, right? If the princess had everything from the beginning, there wouldn't be a story. Anyone who is imperfect or incomplete can become the main character in the story.

Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free.

Cuál es la diferencia entre un guion y una novela? La una es un relato cuya principal herramienta es la palabra, y el otro basa su impacto en las imágenes sin prescindir de la palabra, por eso hay guiones a los que se les califica de muy literarios, porque los personajes hablan mucho.

As Adrienne Rich so acutely observed, "It is hard to write about my own mother. Whatever I do write, it is my story I am telling, my version of the past. If she were to tell her own story, other landscapes would be revealed. But in my landscape or hers, there would be old, smoldering patches of deep-burning anger.

How could she be sorry about losing her virginity in a romance-novel way on a sunset sail?

History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.

The girlfriend was called Gwen

The lie felt good because I had taken control of the narrative around me. The

History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of Man!

I never thought I'd have a story worth telling, at least not one about me.

he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to story that he finally couldn't write it...When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another.

That guy in the corner. Never tells the truth, as a matter of principle. Why answer a question, he says, if you can tell a good story instead?

narrative that derives from James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. The autobiographical "Camera Eye" sections are in the style of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist, and the "Newsreel" sections quoting

Once a computer was asked, "What is the truth?" It took a very long time before the reply came, "I will tell you a story…

Trotski describió en una ocasión a los perdedores como los consignados «al cubo de la basura de la historia» y no es un dato desdeñable que las ediciones sucesivas de la Bolshaya sovietskaya entsiklopediya (Gran Enciclopedia soviética) omitiera a personas, ideas y cosas que el Partido Comunista consideraba políticamente incorrectas, especialmente Trotski después de su ruptura con Stalin.

We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one. The memories we organize meaningfully become those that are better remembered. Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effect shaping new memories to fit our established constructs of the world and ourselves.

Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narrative that rises out of our discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrary events. When surprising things happen, we search for an explanation. The urge to resolve ambiguity can be surprisingly potent, even when the subject is inconsequential.

Presumably, those overhearing half a conversation were strongly compelled to try to infer the missing half in a way that made for a complete narrative. As the authors point out, the study may help explain why we find one-sided cell phone conversations in public spaces so intrusive, but it also reveals the ineluctable way we are drawn to imbue the events around us with rational explanations.

We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one.