Quotes About Narratives

Courses in historiography confront students with the possibility that history, like literature, is about stories and that it necessarily involves philosophical questions, such as how we can actually come to know things.

We are capable of generating an almost infinite number of narratives about the same event, and it is the interpretation of the event that matters, not just the event itself.

Even though there is clearly a strong cultural no-no machine telling you not to summon them on what is functionally penalty of death, the same voice also tells you precisely how to do it, and why you would. That's more or less my experience of culture; warring narratives and fucking nonsense from a circus of spiritual and secular priesthoods that all claim to have it figured out. [...] There it is again, the idea of culture as a kind of curated misinformation.

My mother used to read me stories. They ended happily, but before that, there was usually sadness or difficulty. I never understood why they ended just when the good part was starting.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves . . . Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn't mention—the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls—is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves. Those narratives become the ones we shape ourselves into. They're who we are, even if so much of it is a performance. This

A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn't mention—the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls—is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves.

A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn't mention—the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls—is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves. Those narratives become the ones we shape ourselves into. They're who we are, even if so much of it is a performance.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legend and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop - a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything that we do, but women's pain is a backdrop - a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting the story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

I never trust frank and simple people whose stories hold together.

When you pick a partner, you pick a story, and then you find yourself in a play you never auditioned for. And that is when the narratives clash.

How complex, untrustworthy, and important our stories are. We will never tell you the true story of our lives.

As a child, I was subjected to a lot of spaghetti Westerns and hated them. I wanted the Indians to win - or just not be so sad!

Whatever your opinion on it, 'Sex And The City' was undeniably a show that told stories where the main focus was on women and not on men.

I have come to the conclusion that a goodly number of the fables that pass under the name of the Samian slave, Aesop, were derived from India, probably from the same source whence the same tales were utilised in the Jatakas, or Birth-stories of Buddha.

The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology.

Human beings need stories, and we're looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it's television, whether it's comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

There are a lot of women - directors, producers, writers - involved in my career. They are all interested in telling good stories, and good stories involve men and women.

You know, people make up a lot of different stories about a lot of different things.

Comedy is changing. The appetite for more diverse stories is getting bigger.

We always look to add more diverse characters to shows if we feel we haven't delivered.

Telling diverse stories is at the heart of our culture.