Quotes About Narratives

#1. Just as there can be a hole in these narratives, a memoir can be as much about what's forgotten as what's remembered.

Jane Alison

#2. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems?

Ethan Zuckerman

#3. I like the stories. I like the narratives that you get in fashion photography. And I like what the clothes do to the body - the patterns and stripes and all of that.

Chantal Joffe

#4. I started a production company out of necessity, the need for great narratives for actors of color.

Viola Davis

#5. 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

#6. Narratives are the primary way in which we make sense of our lives, as opposed to, for example schema,cognition, beliefs, constructs. Definition of narrative include the important element of giving meaning to events and experiences over time by connecting them as a developing, continuing story.

Jacqui Stedmon

#7. Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more - the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.

Ali Smith

#8. I'm one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I've been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola.

Junot Diaz

#9. A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots.

Rupert Holmes

#10. Fiction connects: past and present; the great and the small; the surface with the depths. Fiction brings out the innermost, invisible springs of life that cannot be revealed in factual narratives.

Varley O'Connor

#11. As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

David Hare

#12. Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

Joseph Campbell

#13. When I began 'All Our Names,' I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.

Dinaw Mengestu

#14. I'm not going to tell you how to start a bug-powered vehicle, I'm just going to put you inside one with somebody who knows how, and send you off on a ride.

Kameron Hurley

#15. Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.

Mark Twain

#16. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

Susan Sontag

#17. I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.

Darin Strauss

#18. The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.

Melissa Febos

#19. Juliet is one of those rare novels that has it all: lush prose, tightly intertwined parallel narratives, intrigue, and historical detail all set against a backdrop of looming danger. Anne Fortier casts a new light on one of history's greatest stories of passion. I was swept away.

Sara Gruen

#20. My shows are not narratives.

Brian Eno

#21. I love creating individual short stories within chapters, but I want to get better at building consistent narratives from start to finish.

David Crabb

#22. I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.

Jonathan Lethem

#23. What does it mean to write a story of your own life in your head? We all do that whether we are writers or not. We all have a story about who we are: what gender we are, what experiences we have . . . all sorts of stories and narratives we allow ourselves to believe in and create as we go along.

Cyril Wong

#24. It is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent origin and power

Neil Postman

#25. Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative.

Haruki Murakami

#26. When serious people of good faith disagree, they've got to go back into the narratives and come at it again. One of the problems in the church is that people are not willing to do that. People have arrived at a place where they think they have got the answer.

Walter Brueggemann

#27. War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

Phil Klay

#28. 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

#29. I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

Danai Gurira

#30. The magic of life is its imprecision, the multiple narratives constantly unfolding before us. Every step we take, every decision we make, reshuffles the deck of our lives and sets a new trajectory of possibility in motion.

Jamie Metzl

#31. Millions of characters, each with their own epic narratives singing it's hard to be an angel until you've been a demon.

Kate Tempest

#32. Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs
what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?

Thomas Pynchon

#33. Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it requires something to put a handsome face on a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offenses, particularly of blood and wounds ...

Leigh Hunt

#34. As if channeling Robbe-Grillet, who strove to establish 'new relations between man and the world,' Sesshu Foster's electrifying prose poems tenderly examine then fiercely weave stark-and-broken realities into luminous dream-like narratives on the game of life.

Wanda Coleman

#35. 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.

Mikhail Lermontov

#36. Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#37. 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.

Gavriel David Rosenfeld

#38. Comics are a sub-set of pictorial narrative; therefore, all comics are pictorial narratives, but not all pictorial narratives are comics.

Robert C. Harvey

#39. Meaning arises from loving life, not from goals or narratives.

Julio Olalla

#40. My life up until my illness could be understood as the linear sum of my choices. As in most modern narratives, a character's fate depended on human actions, his and others.

Paul Kalanithi

#41. One of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.

Rebecca West

#42. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#43. [I]nternalized experiences of selfhood are linked to autobiographical narratives, which are linked to biographies, legal testimonies, and medical case histories, which are linked to forms of therapy and theories of the subject. . .

Anthony Kenny

#44. Eisman was quick to see narratives, he explained the world in stories, and this was one of the stories he used to explain himself. The

Michael Lewis

#45. Most people aren't familiar enough with what actually goes on in professional wrestling to know just how badly women are treated in WWE narratives.

Jackson Katz

#46. Accurate and questioning dramatic and written narratives that expose true human character, is the necessary glue of any intelligent, enduring and compassionate society.

Yon Walls

#47. They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.

Salman Rushdie

#48. The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective.

Soseki Natsume

#49. Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

David Antin

#50. I read slave narratives, books like Bullwhip Days, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [The Root's chairman] Henry Louis Gates has an amazing documentary called Many Rivers to Cross - really, his whole writings; he's such a wealth of knowledge.

Jurnee Smollett

#51. Conversion stories are one of the classic Western narratives about the self.

Kathryn Schulz

#52. The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

Nick Hornby

#53. In constructing our narratives, we identify which particular events or experiences were formative or transformative. In telling our stories, we also claim some authority over our own experiences and their meanings.

Peg O'Connor

#54. We live in a world of competing narratives. In the end, we have to decide for ourselves which is right. And having made that decision, we then need to inhabit the story we trust.

Alister E. McGrath

#55. Somebody must be up and somebody must be down. Trouble is, campaigns are messy, subtle creatures that don't follow convenient narratives.

Ron Fournier

#56. 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

#57. Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.

Caroline Knapp

#58. It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

David Whyte

#59. I don't write non-fiction because I get bored. Some of my writing is autobiographical, but not the way readers imagine. I use my memory of settings, events and people. I weave history into my stories, but my narratives are made up.

Sefi Atta

#60. I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.

Haruki Murakami

#61. I have always been aware that I can never represent all trans people. No one or two or three trans people can. This is why we need diverse media representations of trans folks to multiply trans narratives in the media and depict our beautiful diversities.

Laverne Cox

#62. We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of e pluribus unum.

Michael Eric Dyson

#63. The necessity of the universal and the particular is a central aspect of liberal education, and is likewise joined in the great narratives of history.

Ellis Washington

#64. Theory includes a transcendent idea, as do all great world narratives.

Neil Postman

#65. What suggests to non-Evangelical scholars that the resurrection narratives contain legendary accounts? First there is a variety of apparent contradictions in the stories which in any ancient narrative would have to arouse the historian's suspicion.

Robert M. Price

#66. Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook ... But we don't need everyone on board; we don't need one magic person in office; we need ourselves. To act. It's the wind, not the weathervanes.

Rebecca Solnit

#67. If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives.

Kate Zambreno

#68. The exercise was meant to illustrate the powerful instinct people have for finding causes for any effect, and also for creating narratives. "The

Michael Lewis

#69. The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.

G. Willow Wilson

#70. A trial is two narratives competing for your attention.

Harlan Coben

#71. In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.

Ava DuVernay

#72. Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

Chris Abani

#73. In food, issues that surround purchasing and that whole realm have a very political component and they branch into stories that can be really compelling. Just being on the farm, interacting with all these people in the industry, leads to personal narratives that can be used to make a larger point.

Dan Barber

#74. Movements have narratives. They tell stories, because they are not just about rearranging economics and politics. They also rearrange meaning. And they're not just about redistributing the goods. They're about figuring out what is good.

Marshall Ganz

#75. 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.

Chris Abani

#76. How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.

Benjamin Zander

#77. By the time these stories were written, six decades had passed since the crucifixion. In that time, the evangelists had heard just about every conceivable objection to the resurrection, and they were able to create narratives to counter each and every one of them.

Reza Aslan

#78. The whole Christmas story was probably a later addition to the gospel narratives, presented only by the authors of Matthew and Luke. Mark and John seem never to have heard of the manger in Bethlehem, the Massacre of the Innocents, the hovering star, the three wise men, and so forth.

Jay Parini

#79. The very admission of the need to harmonize is an admission that the burden of proof is on the narratives, not on those who doubt them. What harmonizing shows is that despite appearances, the texts still might be true.

Robert M. Price

#80. Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'

Sue Monk Kidd

#81. The deep map configures narratives. It is a matrix of intertexual storytelling, charting our movements through the landscape.

Linda Lappin

#82. I just hope this [Emmy] is now a part of the status quo that women of color are included in the narratives that continue to write lead roles for us.

Viola Davis

#83. Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.

Simon Toyne

#84. We are wired to move through our lives chasing and rehearsing narratives that will promise to bring the world back into balance.

Timothy Keller

#85. Ghost stories are always listened to and well received in private, but pitilessly disavowed in public. For my own part, ignorant as I am of the way in which the human spirit enters the world and the way in which he goes out of it, I dare not deny the truth of many such narratives.

Immanuel Kant

#86. I think it's very improtant and healthy to tell differnt stories than the corporatist narratives we are being asked to swallow hook, line and sinker.

John Cusack

#87. 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

#88. Believing in fate has probably always arisen in part because of the delights and terrors of storytelling. We have to realize
to learn
that in life we are not the readers but the authors of our own narratives.

Margaret Visser

#89. When we contextualize faithfully and skillfully, we show people how the baseline "cultural narratives" of their society and the hopes of their hearts can only find resolution and fulfillment in Jesus.

Timothy J. Keller

#90. A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

Richard Schickel

#91. I'm mostly drawn to narratives that are difficult for me to visualize.

Dana Schutz

#92. The process of dehuminazing the locals was under way, and it had very little to do with veracity. The Puritan narratives would continue that process and bring the devil into the mix. At least John Smith didn't think Satan was involved.

Thomas C. Foster

#93. 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.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#94. Carol Guess's poems are sexy, intuitive, angry, and hopeful. These lyrical narratives measure the impossibly small distance between love and fear. They are a reminder that we're all vulnerable little vessels filled by the people who can break us.

Zachary Schomburg

#95. Conflict is the microscope of a book. When it's trained on a character, you see what's underneath the narratives of physical description. You see whether someone is strong or weak, principled or apathetic, heroic or villainous.
(J.R. on writing the BDB series)

J.R. Ward

#96. Writers use narratives to select from everything there is, and make contexts by putting the pieces into relation; that's what writers do, they make contexts.

Paul Shepheard

#97. Life consists of many different stories. A person has not just one but countless life stories that weave in between each other and together create exactly that specific life and that specific human being.

Iben Dissing Sandahl

#98. The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.

Charles Stross

#99. I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives.

Rachel Weisz

#100. When we look at what's going on in the world and we see the immense level of conflict that seems to always be happening - you can always trace it back to competing narratives.

Steven Soderbergh