Narrative Quotes

• The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.

  Edward Norton

  Documentaries, Kind, Film

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• I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves.

  Sam Keen

  Writing, Thinking, Stories

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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• People knew there were two ways of coming at truth. One was science, or what the Greeks called Logos, reason, logic. And that was essential that the discourse of science or logic related directed to the external world. The other was mythos, what the Greeks called myth, which didn't mean a fantasy story, but it was a narrative associated with ritual and ethical practice but it helped us to address problems for which there were no easy answers, like mortality, cruelty, the sorrow that overtakes us all that's part of the human condition. And these two were not in opposition, we needed both.

  Karen Armstrong

  Mean, Practice, Two

  "Big Think Interview With Karen Armstrong". Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• Architectural and product designs have a narrative capacity - you can start to tell a story about them and imagine a lot of things.

  Michael Graves

  Design, Stories, Imagine

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• Multimedia is not more media, but the employment of various kinds of media (and hybrid media) for what they each offer to advance the narrative.

  Fred Ritchin

  Media, Employment, Kind

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• The inherent non-linearity of the digital allows for more input from others, including the subject and reader as collaborators. The top-down, bedtime-style story is of limited use. A non-linear narrative that allows for increased complexity and depth, and encourages both subject and reader to have greater involvement, will eventually emerge more fully from the digital environment. This, in a sense, is the more profound democratization of media.

  Fred Ritchin

  Top Down, Media, Profound

  6 Copy quote

• Build an "inclusive narrative" that goes beyond race, class, religion, etc., so that all may participate in the "the great debates".

  Neil Postman

  Race, Class, May

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• An aphorism is a synthesis of poetry and prose, it is a narrative precipitate, a didactic parable, an ideological concept, in practice it 's compressed and zipped philosophy . It is literature that adapts itself to the digital age.

  William C. Brown

  Philosophy, Practice, Age

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• Fantasy is a product of thought, Imagination of sensibility. If the thinking, discursive mind turns to speculation, the result isFantasy; if, however, the sensitive, intuitive mind turns to speculation, the result is Imagination. Fantasy may be visionary, but it is cold and logical. Imagination is sensuous and instinctive. Both have form, but the form of Fantasy is analogous to Exposition, that of Imagination to Narrative.

  Herbert Read

  Thinking, Imagination, Mind

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• A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque; yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner; yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Powerful, Self, Profound

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• Voice is one of the most elusive qualities in any story. We recognize it when we hear it, but it's hard consciously to create an authentic voice. Somehow voice seems to be the natural manifestation of all the narrative decisions we've made so far. We discover it more than we fabricate it.

  Philip Gerard

  Writing, Voice, Decision

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• People don't live their lives in a series of scenes that form a dramatic narrative, they don't speak in dialogue, they're not lit by a cinematographer or scored by a composer. The properties of real life and the properties of drama have almost nothing to do with each other. The difference between writing about reporters and being a reporter is the same as the difference between drawing a building and building a building.

  Aaron Sorkin

  Life, Real, Drama

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• I've never been very interested in literary narrative in movies, it always seems an obligatory trait and the least interesting of all the things film can do. It forces us to look through the thing instead of at it, it teaches us to ignore our senses and look for meaning outside the immediate world of our experience.

  Rick Alverson

  Interesting, World, Looks

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• I like to think traditional narrative can be subverted by an experiential narrative, by an immersion in the temporal event of the film and a a play with our expectations of that.

  Rick Alverson

  Thinking, Play, Expectations

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• 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

  Writing, People, Climate

  Interview with Ed Finn, www.slate.com. February 6, 2015.

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• I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.

  Vivian Gornick

  Writing, Fiction, Stories

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives - what's handed to us.

  Anne Waldman

  Thinking, Mind, Way

  Source: logosjournal.com

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• One absolutely crucial change is that feminist film theory is today an academic subject to be studied and taught. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was a political intervention, primarily influenced by the Women's Liberation Movement and, in my specific case, a Women's Liberation study group, in which we read Freud and realised the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory for a feminist project.

  Laura Mulvey

  Study Group, Feminist, Political

  Source: en.aup.nl

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• I'm interested in the parallel narrative of our fantasy lives. How the moment of 'now' that is palpably real, is surrounded by our memories, our dreams and hopes, the stories and connections that our brains make as we navigate a universe of fantasy, or unreality, or surreality. I'm keen to explore this very human experience, how our minds create our own realities, a blend of fact and interpretation of fact.

  Dave McKean

  Dream, Memories, Real

  Source: theculturalgutter.com

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• The equivocations, the confusions, the contradictions. There's no way we can live through or comprehend something so big that happened so long ago. We've lost true history. But if we are willing to tolerate the contradictions, and if we suffer through events rather than ticking them off, we may at least get closer to understanding what happened than if we grip the handrail of a carefully polished and reassuringly heroic narrative.

  Nicholson Baker

  Long Ago, Confusion, Understanding

  "Nicholson Baker: Human Smoke" by James Mustich, www.barnesandnoble.com. April 7, 2008.

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• Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.

  Steven Pinker

  Psychology, Mind, Woven

  24 Copy quote

• I love the freedom that the narrative form provides.

  Sidney Sheldon

  Form

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• Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Memories, Thinking, Games

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• 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

  Believe, Broken, Care

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• The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.

  James Carroll

  Memories, Silence, Definitions

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