Quotes About Narrative

What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe.

When history gives out, fiction takes over.

The novel is alive and thriving through various strategies of renovation. The merging of fiction and reality, of memoir and narrative, is one great current source of strength. The reimagining of the historical novel is a second. And the third is the admission of new voices previously unheard or slienced.

But any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate emotions; and although style and narrative are crucial, the bulwark, emotion, is what finally matters. With luck, talent, and studiousness, one manages to make a little pearl, or egg, or something . . .

any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate emotions; and although style and narrative are crucial, the bulwark, emotion, is what finally matters.

History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.

It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.

The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.

the facts of history never come to us pure, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it.

History properly so-called can be written only by those who find and accept a sense of direction in history itself. The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere.

se describen. Al seguir la historia de estas familias

historia, desde los Ducket hasta la familia de Penny, son ficticias, al igual que el papel que cada uno de ellos desempeña en los hechos históricos que se describen. Al seguir la historia de estas familias imaginarias a lo largo de los siglos

You thought that if you didn't tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head.

You are not a tragedy, you are a personal essay. You must rise above and you must do it in the last paragraph with basic grammar and easily recognized words.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die.

First novels are a lot like first children. You lavish all your love and attention on them, but you also make all your rookie mistakes on them. First novels teach you how to write. They are your initial opportunity to put into practice everything you've heard about long-haul narrative. They're your primary attempt at trying to walk in the footsteps of the giant (and not so giant) writers you revere and adore.

Daniel Kahneman astutely observed, "No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.

Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.

A Journal of the Plague Year

We can't rewalk the exact footprints we make in the stories of our lives but we'll hear again our footprints like the lullabies our parents sang us the moment our stories end Perhaps out of our footprints our children will nurse wiser lullabies

Lo literario de viajar es que uno después recuerda algo parecido a un cuento o una novela donde el protagonosta es uno mismo.

I'm a poet, and I like my lies the way my mother used to make them.

Tú hiciste de mi vida un cuento para niños en donde naufragios y muertes son pretextos de ceremonias adorables

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.