Top 100 Quotes About Narratives
#1. I think we have become oversaturated with tired fictional narratives.
Lucy Walker
#2. Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.
Lauren Groff
#3. I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.
Stephen Greenblatt
#4. The reckoning is how we walk into our story; the rumble is where we own it. The goal of the rumble is to get honest about the stories we're making up about our struggles, to revisit, challenge, and reality-check these narratives.
Brene Brown
#5. Writing a children's book means you cannot spin out long narratives or have complex character development.
Norman Macleod
#6. 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
#7. I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.
Ava DuVernay
#8. Ignore the trade-pub narratives about how little success indies enjoy.
Nathan Lowell
#9. The custom of prefixing or appending to historical narratives an estimate of the character and personality of the principal agent is of doubtful advantage at the best of times - it either imparts a specious unity to the action or permits apology or condemnation on moral and emotional grounds.
Ronald Syme
#10. We can't write a serious novel in the 21st century without acknowledging the inescapable self-awareness we're stuck with. The idea we're surrounded by falsehoods and lies. It's hard for the thinking person to believe in narratives. And yet we want some place to invest our belief.
Michael Helm
#11. But to read all Scripture narratives as if they were eye-witness reports in a modern newspaper, and to ignore the poetic and imaginative form in which they are sometimes couched, would be no less a violation of the canons of evangelical literalism than the allegorizing of the Scholastics was.
J.I. Packer
#12. When I started school in 1958 there were no books written by Aboriginals in the school system and everything about Native life was written by white people through their eyes.
Now, Aboriginal writers can tell their stories. They have always been our narratives to tell, not others.
Rick Revelle
#13. The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away. The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives.
Margaret Atwood
#14. Don't let western authors and evangelists fool you, Europeans were NOT killing witches; they were killing WOMEN. If the criminal act was allegedly that of sorcery/witchery, we would have seen similar accounts and charges against men to justify these narratives! They were indeed killing the WOMEN.
Ibrahim Ibrahim
#15. The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
Mary Karr
#16. James Smith argues that liturgies are compressed, performed narratives that recruit the imagination through the body.
James K.A. Smith
#17. The two chapters of Matthew's Gospel devoted to the infancy narratives are not a meditation presented under the guise of stories, but the converse: Matthew is recounting real history, theologically thought through and interpreted, and thus he helps us to understand the mystery of Jesus more deeply.
Pope Benedict XVI
#18. Culture and technology exist in a dynamic reciprocal relationship. Culture comprehends technology through the means of narratives or myths, and those narratives influence the future shape and purposes of technology. The culture-technology circuit is at the heart of cultural evolution.
Brenda Laurel
#20. Tedium and ennui are the demons of modernity. These haunt us when the routines fail, the narratives dissolve, and time disintegrates (p. 718).
James K.A. Smith
#21. 1. Old Testament narratives are not allegories or stories filled with hidden meanings
Gordon D. Fee
#22. Many images of animals, mammals or birds, resurface regularly in my narratives. They are not symbols, but chromatic benchmarks. For me, music has always been the perfect construction - an inaccessible ideal.
Dumitru Tepeneag
#23. The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair.
Philip Zaleski
#24. As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163
Michelle Richmond
#25. If Luke and John were simply constructing narratives to combat Doceticism, they surely shot themselves in the foot with both barrels when they spoke of Jesus appearing through locked doors, disappearing again, sometimes being recognized, sometimes not, and finally ascending into heaven
N. T. Wright
#26. I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.
Jim Crace
#27. People don't think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.
Jonah Berger
#28. Empathy is the driving force behind the experience of emotions in narratives (Keen, 2006; Mar et al., 2006; Oatley, 2011).
Mikkel Wallentin
#29. From the Cognitive Revolution onwards, historical narratives replace biological theories as our primary means of explaining the development of Homo sapiens.
Yuval Noah Harari
#30. And now, I have another good reason to speed up my baby narratives to make my author's profile appear more respectable.
Armineonila M.
#31. Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
John Berger
#32. Confronting and undermining the narratives and ideas of extremism must therefore be one of our key tasks. To do this, we must retain the courage of our convictions in the face of extremism.
Jonas Gahr Store
#33. One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.
Joseph O'Neill
#34. Stories gave shape to Achimwene's life. Narratives gave a series of random events meaning. And so he shaped this, too, as a story.
Lavie Tidhar
#35. I'm fond of implied narratives, oblique angles, and leaving a little room for the viewer to finish a picture.
Keith Carter
#36. It is incredibly difficult to resist our desire to form narratives, to tell stories even if they may not be altogether correct, or correct at all. We like simplicity. We like concrete reasons. We like causes. We like things that make intuitive sense (even if that sense happens to be wrong)
Anonymous
#37. My main goal in this book is to deconstruct the concept of the Jewish "historical right" to the Land of Israel and its associated nationalist narratives, whose only purpose was to establish moral legitimacy for the appropriation of territory.
Shlomo Sand
#38. Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.
Neal Stephenson
#39. We should not delude ourselves into thinking that our historical narratives, as commonly constructed, are anything more than retrofits.
Niall Ferguson
#40. With some songs, I have written narratives or I've tried to carry it through, but generally the things that were more genius, as far as I was concerned, were not that.
Stephen Malkmus
#41. It has often been noted that the biblical stories recounted in the Quran, especially those dealing with Jesus, imply a familiarity with the traditions and narratives of the Christian faith.
Reza Aslan
#42. 'Game of Thrones' is the broadest of narratives. I don't know if anyone in the U.S. has done a story on such a large scale before, both in terms of what George R.R. Martin wrote and what's on the show.
Alex Graves
#43. Every novel is brand-new. It's never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it's merely the latest in a long line of narratives - not just novels, but narratives generally - since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.
Thomas C. Foster
#44. In spite of recent trends towards fabricating photographic narratives, I find, more than ever, traditional photographic capture, the 'discovery' of found narratives, deeply compelling.
Richard Misrach
#45. 'Pierrot le Fou' is something I keep coming back to. It's so surreal but still really engaging - it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.
Shane Carruth
#46. Nothing disappears completely ... In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows ... Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.
Henri Lefebvre
#47. Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.
Philip Schultz
#48. Successful organizations and companies share the stage with their best storytellers. Brands are a collection of narratives. Unleash your best stories.
Carmine Gallo
#49. The homage paid to the fragment and the dismantling of the large narratives had had their spatial counterpart in the lack of integrated and conceptual vision of urban construction, and perhaps also of social construction.
Sverker Sorlin
#50. Understand and challenge your personal narrative. Narratives become choices and actions - which become your life.
Bryant McGill
#51. For me becoming a filmmaker was about taking back my voice - crafting stories that would move away from the problematic narratives that the studio system would put out about Latinos. I think this is why people like my films. They're refreshing. They feel more real.
Aurora Guerrero
#52. Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past.
Mason Cooley
#53. THRILLING NARRATIVES OF MUTINY, MURDER AND PIRACY, A WEIRD SERIES OF Tales of Shipwreck and Disaster, FROM THE EARLIEST PART OF THE CENTURY TO THE PRESENT TIME, WITH ACCOUNTS OF Providential Escapes AND HEART-RENDING FATALITIES.
Anonymous
#54. The media doesn't create narratives, really. They're not that powerful. What they do is they tap into narratives that are already bubbling amongst their viewership or readership.
Beau Willimon
#55. Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite.
Phil Klay
#56. If you do a sketch, that's a very short narrative. Stand-up, it's bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.
Kumail Nanjiani
#57. Over the centuries we have transformed the ancient myths and folk tales and made them into the fabric of our lives. Consciously and unconsciously we weave the narratives of myth and folk tale into our daily existence.
Jack Zipes
#58. THE MISCONCEPTION: You know when you are lying to yourself. THE TRUTH: You are often ignorant of your motivations and create fictional narratives to explain your decisions, emotions, and history without realizing it.
David McRaney
#59. There are many reasons I love novels with multiple narratives. In novels where the events are filtered through the consciousness of a single 'reliable' narrator, I often wonder, is this the whole story? What could be missing here?
Susan Barker
#60. As hard as you try and create narratives about sports, once the ball is in the air, there's not a damn thing you can do about it, it's just very real.
Ian MacKaye
#61. When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.
Hilary Mantel
#62. My role in the government was not to think about narratives and consistency with narratives, but think of the human consequences of rules.
Cass Sunstein
#63. Identifying the source of our personal narratives helps us to release its negative aspects and re-frame it in ways that promote wholeness.
Sharon Salzberg
#64. All I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.
Rebecca Makkai
#65. The Voting Rights Act was a seminal victory for our country and a great healing moment. But there are some who want to continue to drive divisions and create phony narratives.
John Cornyn
#66. There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential - it's as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.
Rachel Cusk
#67. Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely.
Ted Hughes
#68. There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate.
Richard Fortey
#69. There is a visual narrative that is implicitly understandable even when you don't understand the words and in a good comic, and they are hard to find, but good comics have parallel intertwined narratives.
Francoise Mouly
#70. We train ourselves all through our life to waste energy following our inner narratives. We are often unconsciously driven by our fears, worries and fantasies. Enter the space of Awareness of the present moment with no emotional filters, no regrets nor hopes, no daydreaming and no nightmares.
Natasa Nuit Pantovic
#71. People think in narratives - in beginnings, middles and ends. The danger when you edit something too severely is that it no longer makes sense; worse still, it leaves people with the disquieting impression that something is being hidden.
Errol Morris
#72. The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#73. I like the idea of building this wandering, epic narrative in a form that people don't expect epic narratives to appear.
Lucas Neff
#74. Historical facts are the vital framework around which non-fiction writers construct their narratives; they are, quite simply, indispensable.
Saul David
#75. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#76. My sister-in-law believes that few narratives are so tightly constructed that you can't skip boring bits and still keep abreast of what's going on.
Arthur Smith
#77. Loving kindness practice helps us move out of the terrain of our default narratives if they tend to be based on fear or disconnection. We become authors of brand-new stories about love.
Sharon Salzberg
#78. The narratives of Scripture were not meant to describe our world ... but to change the world, including the one in which we now live.
Stanley Hauerwas
#79. Storytellers continue their narratives late into the night to forestall death and to delay the inevitable moment when everyone must fall silent. Scheherazade's story is a desperate inversion of murder; it is the effort, throughout all those nights, to exclude death from the circle of existence.
Michel Foucault
#80. 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.
George Lakoff
#81. People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.
Jonathan Haidt
#82. In the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay of what they are made. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breaths through the erotic.
Alberto Manguel
#83. The bone-breaking thing is something that I put in many narratives.
Guy Maddin
#84. The greatest Church Fathers, for instance, took it for granted that the creation narratives of Genesis could not be treated literally,
David Bentley Hart
#85. The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#86. When you talk to an author or an artist, you're only ever getting half the story. We are crafting narratives for you. We are leaving the messy details out.
Phoebe North
#87. The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.
Tullian Tchividjian
#88. We need creative license with the fictional narratives that become our memories. Anthologized, these are the tales that become the story of your life.
Danielle Ganek
#89. Seeing is flux, he said. I mentioned the hidden narratives in his work, and he said that for him stories were like blood running through a body - paths of life. It was a revealing metaphor, and I never forgot it.
Siri Hustvedt
#90. There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.
Stan Sakai
#91. Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood.
Miriam Toews
#92. As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part of any narratives of their own ... women will be staving off destiny and not inviting or inventing or controlling it.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#93. Back then, as now, narratives shaped outcomes in courtrooms.
Barry Siegel
#94. I do think that narrative is very important - I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.
Ann Leckie
#95. I have always enjoyed storytelling, especially narratives told through the voices of the African diaspora. Their influences are so diverse, so vast. I love incorporating elements of fiction and fantasy into their realities.
CO Patrick
#96. Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera.
David LaChapelle
#97. Extremist perspectives win sympathy and recruits because they offer narratives that claim to identify deep injustices and enemies.
Jonas Gahr Store
#98. A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.
Matthew Tobin Anderson
#99. There has been a failure to grasp how competing narratives fight for the attention of angry young Muslims, and we have grossly underestimated the appeal of the jihadist brand.
Maajid Nawaz
#100. These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.
Hari Kunzru
