Quotes About Narrative

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong.

Slaveowners in America were torturing the Africans they enslaved for reading, but the British had discovered the hard way of truth of the maxim - Nature abhors a vacuum. Fill their minds with your stories and they will adore you; leave their minds free to roam and they will hatch plans to destroy you (181).

So now you have it. The plot, the whole plot, and nothing but the plot.

You will have only one story," she had said. "You'll write your one story many ways. Don't ever worry about story. You have only one.

Until lions start writing down their own stories, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter." —AFRICAN PROVERB

These are hard memories, and I will save the rest of the story for another time.

Totta puhuakseni en piittaa paljonkaan: hyvä tarina on hyvä tarina, tuli se mistä tahansa.

Chroniclers can edit names out as easily as visionaries can noise them abroad.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out.

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.

A story that needs to have words said about it, is a story that does not contain all its own right words. -- Introduction to Varley's "Persistence Of Vision" collection

There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is.

Time is just 'one damn thing after another ', Margaret Atwood says. That sounds like conventional narrative plot. And at the end of our allotted time, we'll end up in one of those, a conventional plot I mean, unless we stipulate otherwise in our wills.

Words were stories in themselves.

There's no point in making up a world, Elisabeth said, when there's already a real world, There's just the world, and there's the truth about the world. You mean there's the truth, and there's the made-up version of it that we get told about the world, Daniel said. No. The world exists. Stories are made up, Elisabeth said. But no less true for that, Daniel said.

There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is...It's the never-ending leaf-fall.

The third person is another pair of eyes. The third person is a presentiment of God. ...... a way to tell the story. It's a box for the endless music that's there between people, waiting to be played.

This story is true and happened once in the future long ago.

Here's an old story so new that it's still in the middle of happening, writing itself right now with no knowledge of where or how it'll end.

And then what happened next, well, it happened next, and history, that other word for irony, went its own foul witty way, sang its own foul witty ditty, and the girl was the one who died young in this story.

He shakes his head. He was a man on a railway platform. There was no story. Except, there is. There always fucking is.

There's ways to survive these times, Doubleclick, and I think one way is the shape the telling takes.