Quotes About Narratives

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we've experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives:

I enjoy stories that can spark a conversation.

My specialty is two things: music or really strange stories.

Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.

Sarah Polley's 'Stories We Tell,' James Ponsoldt's 'The Spectacular Now,' Destin Daniel Cretton's 'Short Term 12' - these are really important movies.

I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.

Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.

We're like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings.

There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories.

We should not delude ourselves into thinking that our historical narratives, as commonly constructed, are anything more than retrofits.

young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated 'modules', not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast.

What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.

My generation is so motivated to tell their own stories because we have so many that need to be heard.

Both mythology and history interest me.

American myths have never been colorless.

People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.

I am attracted to myths.

All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened.

Nearly everything that defines much of our daily experiences is consummatory in nature. Yes, we consume products and services. But we also consume life experiences, religious narratives, art, literature, and ideas.

I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential - up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.

Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They're devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.

African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.

People always want narratives to be clean and easy.

Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.