Quotes About Narratives

Somebody asked me earlier if I thought it was really important to tell stories about women's struggles. And I said yes, but at the same time, it's also important to tell stories about women's triumphs, women being slackers, women being criminals, women being heroes.

In high school, I began to dig my way into Ethiopian history, and began to understand myself as a young man formed by multiple narratives.

Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.

Shakespeare is so fundamental to the way we see story. A tremendous amount of narratives come from him - more than many authors are aware, I think.

There's a great appetite for smart television. Every day I get up and there are interesting stories I want to do.

I don't really look for challenges as much as I like adventures. Other than that I'm just trying to find stories I want to tell.

'God' - as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to.

The stories we tell, and the ones we absorb, are what allow us to pluck meaning from the rush of experience. Only through the patient interrogation of these stories can we begin to understand where we are and how we got here.

We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.

The women I know are smart, interesting people who aren't just there to service the men's stories, so I don't know why our art continues to do that.

The whole class system has oppressed so many people and given them such lack of opportunity. They are fed such strong narratives that this is where you belong and this is where you are.

Storytellers continue their narratives late into the night to forestall death and to delay the inevitable moment when everyone must fall silent. Scheherazade's story is a desperate inversion of murder; it is the effort, throughout all those nights, to exclude death from the circle of existence.

I'd love to do a whole series of stories and have them collected into books.

We all love narratives where we're the captain of our boat, and Americans love them more than anybody else.

I just love the days when you come out of the archives with half a dozen excellent descriptions or poignant accounts of personal experiences.

I love going on BBC6 and BBC7 and listening to documentaries.

Stories of individual animals must now be told. Not stats and population densities, but characters in stories that very much mirror our own daily struggles to survive. An individual, well loved, even heroic wolf like OR7 with whom we've so deeply identified can never be a statistic again.

But in the end you cannot serve two masters, Theos and Elohim, the god of the Greco-Roman philosophers and Caesars and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the violent god of profit proclaimed by the empire and the compassionate God of justice proclaimed by the prophets. You can try to hybridize them and compromise them for centuries, but like oil and water they eventually separate and prove incompatible. They refuse to alloy. They produce irreconcilable narratives and create different worlds.

Deftly handled, myths and legends can become tools or weapons, while mere facts are just . . . facts.

The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories. Nothing has meaning in itself: all the objects in the world would be shards of bare mute blankness, spinning wildly out of orbit, if we didn't bind them together with stories.

La realidad es siempre más amable que las historias que contamos sobre ella.

History, like memories themselves, tended to become distorted with the passing of time, or worse, corrupted with the agendas of those writing it.

The thing about stories is you have to pick the ones that last.

Perhaps this is what our national parks hold for us: stories, of who we have been and who we might become- a reminder that as human beings our histories harbor both darkness and light. To live in the United States of America and tell only one story, from one point of view, diminishes us all.