Narrative With Quotes

#1. The missional church will take context seriously, but will also work on recovering the biblical narrative with its richness and potency for today's world. When story and context are equally embraced, we are beginning to think and act missionally.

Michael Frost

#2. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has found that hearing a story - a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end - causes our brains to release cortisol and oxytocin. These chemicals trigger the uniquely human abilities to connect, empathize, and make meaning.

Brene Brown

#3. There is this idea of history as something you make, as a meaningful narrative with a beginning and an end, the end being a utopia of happiness that we'll reach through socialism or free trade or democracy, and then it will all be wonderful.

Pankaj Mishra

#4. Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice - A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice.

Alexander Pope

#5. At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention.

Julia Bacha

#6. Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, ... for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it.

Paul Fussell

#7. Everyone listened to this amusing narrative with great interest, and the moment that Behemoth concluded it, they all shouted in unison: 'Lies!

Mikhail Bulgakov

#8. The comics medium has some unusual features that do make it very different, in that it's combining a verbal narrative with a visual one that allows for much richer possibilities of transmitting information.

Alan Moore

#9. It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.

Margaret Atwood

#10. Through the potent example of his own life, President Obama enabled us to believe the best about America, and, therefore, about ourselves. That uplifting narrative - essentially equating the promise of America with his extraordinary life story - swept candidate Obama into the presidency.

Cynthia P. Schneider

#11. I'm a little bit too obsessed with the news. I find the news easier to follow than narrative entertainment programs.

Jon Stewart

#12. Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist?

Don DeLillo

#13. If you're not [Federico] Fellini you might make something very vulgar. Animation made it possible to maintain unity with all these different narratives.

Marjane Satrapi

#14. The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'

Mark Bradford

#15. The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

Sara Sheridan

#16. I've always had a problem with conventional punctuation of dialogue because it does seem to me to set it off too much from the narrative. I mean, in life, things don't stop while somebody says something, and then stuff starts up again; it's all happening at once.

Kate Grenville

#17. When you're on stage, you build strong relationships with the actors, but it's a story you tell with the audience - you have to include them, you have to respond to them, they have to understand the narrative.

Romola Garai

#18. 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.

Julie Wilson

#19. You don't enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.

Wes Craven

#20. Throughout the narrative you will find many statements that are obviously nonsensical and quite at variance with common sense. For the most part these are true.

Robert Gilmore

#21. I plan years in advance, but I like to leave enough space in the narrative scheme to change things, because I always get my best ideas the closer I come to the end of a project, after I've lived with it for a while.

Grant Morrison

#22. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#23. In spite of the air of fablethe public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.

Edgar Allan Poe

#24. [My work] looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge.

Nicolas Provost

#25. Our experience with knowledge, the way we know things, is not that neat. It doesn't fit into a grand narrative, the way we've been taught to read.

Richard Misrach

#26. I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.

Jeff Kinney

#27. You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#28. When I started thinking seriously about learning the rules of narrative, I thought, 'You've learned the rules of dancing from the ballet; what's the matter with learning the laws of theater from the people who know how to do it?'

Twyla Tharp

#29. I loved the show Lost, in part because the writers were so nimble in how they would take things from previous episodes, that probably weren't created with any intent towards a larger narrative, and they would get woven into narratives in a really elegant and exciting way.

Ed Helms

#30. Oh yeah, I grew up with comics. You know, I always like to describe myself as a 'narrative junkie.' I love novels, I love comics, movies, TV. If it's a good story, I'm hooked.

David Liss

#31. In New York and L.A., there is sort of that silent competition to be on the cutting edge of something. You end up having a conversation with how the world receives your work, especially if you are writing narrative, not fiction. Sometimes it is an awkward conversation. It's like group therapy.

Sloane Crosley

#32. In all the history of the boxing game, you'll find no human interest story to compare with the life narrative of James J. Braddock.

Damon Runyon

#33. I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

Rachel Cusk

#34. I like a narrative, even if it's fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them - sometimes phonetics. I'm just stringing those together.

Stephen Malkmus

#35. I said once that lies have no rights against truth. I was wrong. In daily life, it's the truth that's disenfranchised. What fits the popular narrative, what makes an observer happy with the consistency of events, is what is believed.

Adrian Lamo

#36. This is how it works now with the news: the story begins with a moral, then a narrative is fashioned to support it.

Walter Kirn

#37. The only consistent narrative we possess is one that we share with every other life-form: we are born, we live, and then we die.

Steven Erikson

#38. Believe it or not, one of the things I try to do around here is try to look for opportunities to work with people across the aisle. I know that's not the common narrative. But the truth is if you want to get anything done, that's an absolute requirement.

John Cornyn

#39. Quest stories are about the oldest form of narrative there is, and they're also the perfect metaphor for life because we're all on a journey trying to figure out where we're going and who we are. 'Solomon Creed' is just doing it with more danger and guns involved.

Simon Toyne

#40. If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

Gloria Steinem

#41. Thus, while not all Scripture is generically narrative, it can reasonably be claimed that the story Scripture tells, from creation to new creation, is the unifying element that holds literature of other genres together with narrative in an intelligible whole.

Ellen F. Davis

#42. 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

#43. It's so often that I read for the bouncy, sunny girl men fall in love with who will solve all the romantic problems in the narrative. I don't choose to work that way.

Sarah Gadon

#44. Forecasting is simply not a strength of the species; we are much better with tools and narrative storytelling.

Barry Ritholtz

#45. I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene.

Harmony Korine

#46. The Singing of Swans is a remarkable narrative calling
even compelling
us to connect with our own ancestral roots, to seek our own inner wisdom, and to reclaim our own inner voices!

Margaret Starbird

#47. I am not given to making sense out of life - or coming up with some grand narrative on it - other than to measure it by what you think you want to do in life. As for me, I have done what I had wanted to, to the best of my ability. I am satisfied.

Lee Kuan Yew

#48. I was interested in the narrative of how we nurture our elite in this society: all that stuff about believing in yourself and not accepting second best. Our inner world is at odds with that.

Lenny Abrahamson

#49. If you agree with me that a poem can be as bountiful as a rich Victorian narrative, and as wise ... then you'll want to join me here in the Wow, I Like No Need of Sympathy Club. Your membership fee is the same as your membership privileges: this book.

Albert Goldbarth

#50. I find that the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might just be a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come.

V.S. Naipaul

#51. It's easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

David Brooks

#52. I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.

Jonathan Coe

#53. Larger game teams are often a bit more experienced at working with writers, which is often a huge relief. However, it also means that there are more people wanting to wander around the narrative kitchen telling you how you should be making your story pies.

Rhianna Pratchett

#54. 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

#55. A short story is a short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour, to one or two hours in its perusal ... having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out ...

Edgar Allan Poe

#56. Taking photographs seems to be a means to express some kind of emotional, abstractive narrative. I look at the images that I'm most proud of like a film about the world the way I see it (or at least saw it at that moment, a perspective that seems to be ever-shifting and filled with self-doubt.)

Anton Yelchin

#57. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#58. Half an hour later, as I was deeply immersed in the story of The Man of the Hill, that curious, lengthy digression which seems to have nothing to do with the main narrative but is in fact its cornerstone..

Jonathan Coe

#59. I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

Dinaw Mengestu

#60. I'm a music storyteller and collaborator. I hear character, location, and story as music. For me a score is there to both heighten the story and to actually tell the story with the unique emotional and narrative powers of music.

David Raiklen

#61. It's all about the sensuality of movement, every movement you make. That's why I love doing action movies. It's all about movement, dance - even if you're hitting someone in the face. You've got to sell it all with great passion. There's a narrative to the body. It's exactly the same as dance.

DeObia Oparei

#62. Polly finished her huge narrative during the summer term. The day after she had finished it, she went round with the oddest mixture of feelings, pride at having got it done, sick of the sight of it and glad it was over, and completely lost without it.

Diana Wynne Jones

#63. There is no narrative now, no "And then," only a disjointed series of images. A pile of photographs I've flipped through so many times that I don't even need to look at them anymore to know what's there, to see it, to cover my face with my hands and cry.

Kat Rosenfield

#64. Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions?

Douglas Coupland

#65. If the narrative we've adopted says that our lives have to get better in order for our relationships with God to be legitimate, we twist the gospel into a moral improvement scheme.

Tullian Tchividjian

#66. I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.

Chelsea Cain

#67. Most importantly, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

Daniel Kahneman

#68. A society that's addicted to narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings will eventually yearn to end. We just want it to end.

Douglas Rushkoff

#69. Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they're writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can't hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.

Paul Fussell

#70. The best narrative is one of infinite love. A spiritual affair
one not of the material world. Intermingled, with no beginning nor end
it will always stand the test of time.

Terry A. O'Neal

#71. I will throw all my best efforts into it, my thoughts and political observations, but ultimately I want to create a narrative that keeps you turning the pages and leaves you with a sense that this thing has a reason for being there.

Frank Miller

#72. you know: CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF HUGS IS THE ENTIRE REASON I EVER ENGAGE IN ANY NARRATIVE, FICTIONAL OR OTHERWISE??

Ryan North

#73. What we have seen with Islamist extremism, whether it is in Mali or Somalia or Afghanistan, is that the disease is not necessarily the individual country. The disease is the Islamist extremism, and that's what we have to fight; that's the narrative that we have to beat.

David Cameron

#74. I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it ... Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don't you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.

Elmore Leonard

#75. The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.

Siegfried Sassoon

#76. The folktale world is oriented positively toward its protagonist; a folktale is defined by the hero's triumph: magic weapons and helpers are, with the necessary narrative retardation, at his beck and call.

Darko Suvin

#77. As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

Stephen King

#78. Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

Margaret Atwood

#79. When you start a novel, it is always like pushing a boulder uphill. Then, after a while, to mangle the metaphor, the boulder fills with helium and becomes a balloon that carries you the rest of the way to the top. You just have to hold your nerve and trust to narrative.

Jim Crace

#80. A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did.

Martin Filler

#81. The belief in a happy "state of nature" in the remote past is derived partly from the biblical narrative of the age of the patriarchs, partly from the classical myth of the golden age. The general belief in the badness of the remote past only came with the doctrine of evolution.

Bertrand Russell

#82. The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it.

Robert Coover

#83. I think about entrance and exits. I think about dialogue. But most of all I think about voice - all character development in theatre is done through voice. And as I wrote my debut novel "The Big Fear", I thought about narrative voice with every line.

Andrew Case

#84. Without language to give them shape, memories are just like houses with no walls. They're merely events seeking to chain themselves together into causes and effects; survival unhindered by narrative.

Sorin Suciu

#85. Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn't say their didn't shore it up with footnotes and research.

China Mieville

#86. The novel is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt and reason, offering a complex narrative steeped with ethical debates of God, free will and morality. Since

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#87. staff of U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet and submitted his narrative in 2001. With the ongoing war in Iraq, I felt it appropriate that a broader audience have access to Commander Winkler's work.

David F. Winkler

#88. There is enormous need for professionals who know how to tell stories with narrative punch and nuance, who can work proactively and not just reactively, and whose approach is multi-faceted. We need more "useful photographers."

Fred Ritchin

#89. There is a narrative behind every image. I often imagine being able to see the photographer standing behind the camera, or perhaps crouching or running with it.

James Welling

#90. The inimitable stories of Tong-King never have any real ending, and this one, being in his most elevated style, has even less end than most of them. But the whole narrative is permeated with the odour of joss-sticks and honourable high-mindedness, and the two characters are both of noble birth.

Ernest Bramah

#91. We can change the narrative about Africa with content.

Mo Abudu

#92. At least in America, the narrative is I'm a Cannes favorite. But, in fact, I've had my best experience in Venice, both with the audience and the jury.

James Gray

#93. I first read 'The Lord of the Rings' as an adolescent. It's a dense novel, a sprawling, complex monster of a book populated with a prolific number of characters caught up in a narrative structure that, frankly, does not lend itself to conventional storytelling.

Peter Jackson

#94. I'm trying to make perfect moments. And those generate meaning. If you go deep enough in how to make a moment, very quickly you come to how narrative works - to what we are as a species, how we've come up with telling stories in scenes and images.

Ira Glass

#95. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.

Yuval Noah Harari

#96. Kurkov loves his weltschmerz as much as the next guy
but he doesn't see why weltschmerz shouldn't come bundled up with a narrative that kicks a little bit of ass
the edge of the left cheek, say.

Nick Hornby

#97. The people who lived beside the river for thousands of years, and whose history was intertwined with that landscape, have been very effectively excluded from ts recorded narrative.

Helen Humphreys

#98. 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.

Leah C. Fowler

#99. With the adult ones, I feel I need to get as deep inside the psychology of a character as I can, and that needs to be first-person. In the children's books, I feel I need some distance. I don't want to be the nine-year-old at the center of the story. I need to have some type of narrative voice.

John Boyne

#100. The novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.

Randall Jarrell