Narrative Quotes
93 quotes
"A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument"
"Narrative understanding is a large part of the ability to connect with, understand, and have compassion for all of us engaged in learning more about being human."
"I heard the stories of the storytellers, telling the stories people wanted to hear. Everyone finds the narrative that matches the narrative they already know and want. It wasn't that I didn't want to share the truth. It wasn't that I feared the response. It was that I no longer believed in a truth."
"All stories have a curious and even dangerous power. They are manifestations of truth -- yours and mine. And truth is all at once the most wonderful yet terrifying thing in the world, which makes it nearly impossible to handle. It is such a great responsibility that it's best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, or without knowing it you can change the world."
"The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth (Niels Bohr)." By this, he means that we require a larger reading of the human past, of our relations with each other, the universe and God, a retelling of our older tales to encompass many truths and to let us grow with change."
Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future
"When she smiles, the lines in her face become epic narratives that trace the stories of generations that no book can replace."
"If you write then you are reborn because by writing about the moment, you can relive it for a second time."
"The Princess BrideS. Morgenstern'sClassic Tale of True Loveand High AdventureYou had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone had a chance to read it."
"I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything."
"It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know."
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
"Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men."
"Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: "Tell the history of our time through the people who make it."
Walter Isaacson, American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane
"Stories were heirlooms in these parts."
Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship
"Lewis wanted us to understand that the inner world is shaped by stories."
"Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon"
"Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies."
Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
"Never miss an opportunity to be truly and deeply humiliated! The shame will carve you down to an individual of exquisite layering, and in the process, etch within you the arcs of exceptional narrative."
"The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes."
"All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot."
"We need to know not only what is done but what is purposed and said by those who shape the destines of states and realms." Horace Greeley"
Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
"The press-savy Lincoln looked not to the future, but to the past."
Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
"Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told."
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
"Parables release the adrenaline of urgency into our bloodstream."
"We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear."
"Above all, readers want useful information, whether from a road sign or an investment guide. This motive is not completely absent even in readers of fiction, although few people read Madame Bovary for straightforward advice on how not to run a marriage. At a more abstract level, readers want a narrative that makes the world seem to make sense, and they sometimes choose stories that fit with their worldview rather than stories that fit the facts."
Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
"What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences."
"No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words."
"The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other."
John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science
"What just cause can be found for the encounter of so many nations, or what hatred inspired them all to take arms against each other? It is proof that the human race lives for its kings, for it is at the mad impulse of one mind a slaughter of nations takes place, and at the whim of a haughty ruler that which nature has taken ages to produce perishes in a moment."
"The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension."
Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
"Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing…sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood."
"What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It’s what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you’ve lost the plot. Or just lost it."
"Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion."
"A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story."
"Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true."
"… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass … by which I could give them the means to read within themselves."
"Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent."
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
"Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language until our death, we are perpetually surrounded by narratives, first of all in our family, then at school, then through our encounters with people and reading. - The Novel as Research. (1968)"
"Without stories we end up with stereotypes -- a flat earth with flat cardboard figures that have no texture or depth, no INTERIOR."
"Berg was proud of his storytelling to the point where he collected stories about telling stories."
Nicholas Dawidoff, The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg
"Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."
"In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative--there always was--but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?"
"Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world."
"I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well."
"The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story."
"Public transit situates us so that we are given license to accept what's right in front of us, but will likely arouse our desire to compare our narrative to someone else's, to give ourselves permission to speculate upon a person's private space, or life, with no fear of recourse or punishment."
"We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment—narrative catechisms."
"There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles"
"Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories."
Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
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