Historical Narrative Quotes

#1. A novel takes place over time. It's a historical narrative, and it needs to have a series of peaks and valleys and the move through. You can't just start at the highest pitch and stay there, but you can in a lyric poem.

Edward Hirsch

#2. Any historical narrative is a bundle of silences.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

#3. Fascinating, often hilarious, always devastatingly truthful, The Inconvenient Indian is destined to become a classic of historical narrative. For those who wish to better understand Native peoples, it is a must read. For those who don't wish to understand, it is even more so.

Joseph Boyden

#4. And it is always the victors who write the historical narrative.

Camilla Lackberg

#5. For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.

Michael Rostovtzeff

#6. Art is only important to the extent that it aids in the liberation of our people.

Elizabeth Catlett

#7. I have not met a man as tall as me who is as quick as me, ever.

Tyson Fury

#8. There is no master narrative nor realist perspective to provide a background of social and historical facts.

Kathy Acker

#9. It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around ... It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.

Barbara Tuchman

#10. Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book. His readers made it so.

Christopher B. Krebs

#11. I can change the world with my own two hands

Jack Johnson

#12. Not all Muslims wish to express themselves in public through a communal religious identity. Identities are multiple, and some may wish to speak instead just as citizens in their professional capacity, through their political party, or their neighborhood body.

Maajid Nawaz

#13. He felt ready to face the devil, and strutted in the ballroom with the swagger of a cavalier.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#14. They are being offered a narrative, an historical story whose hope of 'salvation' lies not in a flight from history but in a great convulsive change within history, a transformation in which there will be continuity with the present as well as discontinuity.

N. T. Wright

#15. I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.

Joshua Ferris

#16. I have always been very fortunate in my working life in terms of the, I say that like I've not been fortunate at all in my private life.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

#17. The popular story is that America was built by immigrants and that, therefore, everything about immigration is good and leads to a more successful society. This narrative is so devoid of historical context that it should embarrass anyone beyond a second-grade education.

James Howard Kunstler

#18. I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.

David Levering Lewis

#19. With my family, historical facts are subsidiary to narrative, and narrative must always show the narrator in the best light.

Stuart Rojstaczer

#20. Everybody kind of understands, Oh yeah you take drugs and it does something to your brain and then you can't stop. It's easier to describe that shame, that horrible feeling of not being able to control your own life.

Aimee Mann

#21. For some reason, notwithstanding the alienation and utter rejection, I consider myself a global citizen. They say misery calls for company and I've always been a man of funerals. The companion of the misfortunate, until they are not!

Asaad Almohammad

#22. He had decided that what was going on was that everybody was very carefully avoiding paying attention to what was going on.

Robert Anton Wilson

#23. The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out.

C.S. Lewis

#24. And Life continues to be fascinating ...

Maila Nurmi

#25. Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.

Hilary Mantel

#26. Ida was a natural historian who knew how to throw in enough fiction to keep up dramtic tension. And she was replete with details, like a big fat colorful nineteenth-century historical novel, inching forward slowly ... Ida's narrative line, like her waistline, was ample.

Marissa Piesman

#27. Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.

Aminatta Forna

#28. Develop a skin as thick as a rhinoceros hide!

Eleanor Roosevelt

#29. Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.

Lloyd DeMause

#30. I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.

Rachel Kushner

#31. So now, all alone or not, you gotta walk ahead. Thing to remember is if we're all alone, then we're all together in that too.

Cecelia Ahern

#32. I like to break left when people think I'm going to go right.

Justin Cronin

#33. Now in my opinion it is certainly a complete mistake to suppose that no narrative of events in this type of literature has any significance beyond the purely historical record; but it is equally rash to maintain that every single statement in those books is a complex of allegorical meanings. That

Augustine Of Hippo