Narrative Quotes - Page 19

• As I see it, a successful story of any kind should be almost like hypnosis: You fascinate the reader with your first sentence, draw them in further with your second sentence and have them in a mild trance by the third. Then, being careful not to wake them, you carry them away up the back alley of your narrative and when they are hopelessly lost within the story, having surrendered themselves to it, you do them terrible violence with a softball bag and then lead them whimpering to the exit on the last page. Believe me, they'll thank you for it.

  Alan Moore

  Softball, Believe, Successful

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• What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Attention, Entering, Disappear

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• We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience.

  Joan Didion

  Order, Lines, Shifting

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• Life is never static. Despite catastrophic tragedies, life has persisted in evolving new varieties of unimaginable forms. I find comfort in the narrative of evolutionary history.

  Greg Graffin

  Tragedy, Comfort, Life Is

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• If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

  Errol Morris

  Believe, Self, Deception

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• If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.

  Oliver Sacks

  Real, Unique, Men

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

  Joseph Campbell

  Metaphor, Myth, Symbolic

  Joseph Campbell (2002). “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion”, p.28, New World Library

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• The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky amphetamine world. That woman-a pieta. Those men, rough angels with an unknown message. The children holding hands, spanning time. And in every still-life, there is a story, the story that tells you everything you need to know.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Children, Lying, Angel

  Jeanette Winterson (2006). “Lighthousekeeping”, p.143, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form. Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that solution in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical purpose, but it contained a possibility.

  Haruki Murakami

  Real, Cutting, Math

  "Town of Cats" by Haruki Murakami, www.newyorker.com. September 5, 2011.

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• Hardly any aspect of my life, from where I had lived to my education to my employment history to my friendships, had been free from the taint of racial inequity, from racism, from whiteness. My racial identity had shaped me from the womb forward. I had not been in control of my own narrative. It wasn’t just race that was a social construct. So was I.

  Tim Wise

  Race, Racism, Identity

  Tim Wise (2013). “White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son”, p.8, Soft Skull Press

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• Why will people persist in reading strange meanings into the simplest of story? Is it not enough that a writer can entertain for a few hours with narrative without being suspected of 'significances' or symbolism or 'social trends'?

  Margaret Mitchell

  Reading, Symbolism, People

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• The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.

  Michael Chabon

  Stars, Lying, Writing

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• Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet.

  Russell Brand

  Self, Ideas, People

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• I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

  Lydia Davis

  Character, Creating, Scene

  Interview with Sarah Manguso, www.believermag.com. January, 2008.

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• To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

  Umberto Eco

  Reading, Mean, Games

  "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods". Book by Umberto Eco, 1994.

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• Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

  Charles de Lint

  Teenager, Writing, Inspire

  "EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Charles de Lint". Interview with Charles Tan, www.sfsignal.com. September 09, 2010.

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• My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

  Donald Miller

  Teacher, Children, School

  Donald Miller (2007). “Miller 3-in-1: Blue Like Jazz, Through Painted Deserts, Searching for God”, p.21, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.

  Joe Hill

  Character, Thinking, Plot

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• The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Baby, Book, Reading

  "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?". Book by Jeanette Winterson, www.abc.net.au. 2011.

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• …everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Stories, Alive, Fit

  "Silently and Very Fast". Book by Catherynne M. Valente, 2011.

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• Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind – they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death.

  Stephen King

  Real, Writing, Character

  "22 lessons from Stephen King on how to be a great writer". www.businessinsider.com. August 11, 2015.

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• Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Reading, Men, Hands

  "The Marriage Plot: A Novel". Book by Jeffrey Eugenides, 2011.

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• To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must “recollect” ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.

  Oliver Sacks

  Drama, Men, Self

  Oliver Sacks (2014). “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: Picador Classic”, p.101, Pan Macmillan

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• The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you've not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you're still invested in your self-loathing. Perhaps not forgiving yourself is the flip side of your stealing-this-now cycle. Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did? If you perpetually condemn yourself for being a liar and a thief, does that make you good?

  Cheryl Strayed

  Liars, Self, Order

  "Dear Sugar, The Rumpus advice Column #68: The bad things you did". therumpus.net. March 24, 2011.

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• Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.

  Jessica Stern

  People, Anxiety, Doe

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