Quotes About Narratives

The halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simple and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations: good people do only good things and bad people are all bad. The statement "Hitler loved dogs and little children" is shocking no matter how many times you hear it, because any trace of kindness in someone so evil violates the expectations set up by the halo effect. Inconsistencies reduce the ease of our thoughts and the clarity of our feelings.

The halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simple and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations: good people do only good things and bad people are all bad.

The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ. When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise.

Geschichten in Geschichten in Geschichten. Man weiß nie, wo eine endet und eine andere beginnt! In Wahrheit fließen alle ineinander. Nur in Büchern sind sie säuberlich getrennt.

In Brueghel's hands, Ovid's tale of a son's willful rejection of his father's wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.

A community, a family, is a group of people who share common stories. The health of any community depends directly on the health of the stories the community embraces.

You are your stories. You are the product of all the stories you have heard and lived—and of many that you have never heard. They have shaped how you see yourself, the world, and your place in it.

The pieces in this book, then, are quite literally "speculative writing," neither stories nor essays but something more like fables: compressed narratives, grounded in real experience and as true as they need to be, with little "morals" at the end. They move directly from what I have seen and experienced to what I think about it, from the particular to the general, with none of the recursiveness of ordinary essays and short stories.

but the meanings hidden in great stories are universal,

It takes a long time to ruin a life. It all starts with the stories we live by.

A culture can be no stronger than its strongest myths.

Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?

No lies, I thought, but lots of stories. True stories. True lies. Powerful stories, heroic tales, and cautionary fables.

I am aware of how often over the past year I have listened to sermons and religious leaders turn the biblical narratives into a useful handbook for making one's life work more successful. I'm aware of how this Oprahization of the Christian narrative has turned us ever more quickly into anxiety-laden, functional atheists needing ways to use God to make our lives work.

Peaky' is a very personal thing for me because it's based on stories that I was told as a kid by my parents. At the very beginning, I tried to have other writers involved but it just didn't work.

There are lots of stories about my culture that I think bring a whole other perspective to who we are and where we have been and how we got here that I think need to be done.

Mythologies become exhausting burdens, from a writer's perspective.

'Udta Punjab' is a story of four different people merged together. There are four different stories and four different perspectives.

Hollywood is all made up, anyway. Especially the stories and angles that people want to pin on you.

The stories we tell each other and the stories we tell about heroism, about magic, about faith - those things say a lot about who we are and the kind of lessons that we wanna convey to our children.

I don't wanna be like somebody that just depicts black characters where drugs and guns are just a majority of what they have to do.

When I began 'All Our Names,' I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.

The sheer number of legendary narratives and historically verifiable incidents invites us to revise assumptions about the origins of biological and chemical warfare and its moral and technological constraints.

Ever since wars have been fought, guys have been writing their stories.