Quotes About Narratives

Las grandes novelas son como las ciudades: lugares cotidianos donde suceden hechos extraordinarios. Todas las vidas posibles se superponen y se entrecruzan en sus calles y una ciudad es también un tejido de relatos.

There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who— other than himself, in Jhesh's tavern, increasingly wearily—still told those?

History: the lies of the victors, the self-delusions of the defeated.

From love's absolutism to love's absolution? No: I don't believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only closure I believe in; and the wound will stay open until that final shutting of the doors. As for redemption, it's far too neat, a movie-maker's bromide; and beyond that, it feels like something grand, which human beings are too imperfect to deserve, much less bestow upon themselves.

I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables.

Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.

Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.

True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.

Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.

Men's stories are seen as universal, women's as particular. What women are up against is the battle to not be marginalized.

I'm not sure that it's easy to find very interesting female characters in Hollywood movies.

We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.

What's interesting is that when you get into the post-war period, many of the narratives in books and movies conclude that if you killed Hitler, you're actually going to make history worse.

In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper.

Human nature stays the same, the one thing that stays constant, like death and taxes. And people still want good stories!

Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely.

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

I often forget that other people's stories aren't simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn from or repeat or dissect or savor.

While religious and financial manias might seem to have little in common, the underlying forces that give them rise are identical: the desire to improve one's well-being in this life or the next. And the factors that amplify the contagion of financial and religious mass delusions are also similar: the hardwired human propensity to imitate, to fabricate and consume compelling narratives, and to seek status.

But then, we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves. The money man tells himself that by getting rich he is actually enriching others, the artist tells himself that his creations are things of deathless beauty, the soldier tells himself he is on the side of the angels.

Religion is perhaps most helpfully conceived of as the question of what tales and traditions our lives embody.

I]n most human societies, men tend to try, and usually succeed, to monopolize the most exciting, dramatic kinds of work—they'll set the fires that burn down the forest on which they plant their fields, for example, and, if they can, relegate to women the more monotonous and time-consuming tasks, such as weeding. One might say that men will always take for themselves the kind of jobs one can tell stories about afterward, and try to assign women the kind you tell stories during.

We are dealing, again, with powerful modern myths. Such myths don't merely inform what people say: to an even greater extent, they ensure certain things go unnoticed.

History is full of stories that aren't actually true. —LORD CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON