Narrative Quotes - Page 22

• Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story. And in the absence of other narratives, it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from.

  A.M. Homes

  Family, Children, Agreement

  A.M. Homes (2012). “The Mistress's Daughter: A Memoir”, p.93, Granta Books

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• The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.

  Elif Batuman

  Meaningful, Struggle, Book

  Elif Batuman (2011). “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them”, p.84, Granta Books

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• If a few nations step forward and begin changing the narrative of 'us and them' to 'everyone,' we will see a new dawn. If a few nations begin actually making operational a verification system we can all depend upon and push to bring all into such a system, we will all benefit.

  Jonathan Granoff

  Humanity, Dawn, Benefits

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• Our lives with all their miracles and wonders are merely a discontinuous string of incidents - until we create the narrative that gives them meaning

  Arlene Goldbard

  Writing, Giving, Miracle

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• Data coming out our ears but we lack narrative.

  Roy Sekoff

  Data, Ears, Coming Out

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• A Machine to Make a Future is an insightful and creative contribution to the literature--both scholarly and journalistic--on contemporary genomics. By 'experimenting' with narrative genre, the authors hope to generate different insights into the world of genomics and biotechnology than ones generally presented in existing accounts. They succeed at that goal, providing an account that is ethnographically rich and analytically open to a world whose structure, implications, and outcomes are very much in the making.

  Nadia Abu El Haj

  Goal, Creative, Insightful

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• Works of art are not so much finished as abandoned. Perhaps poems can be perfect. A short-short story might even be perfectible, as effective and enjoyable for one reader as the next. But novels and other book-length narratives are great rambling things that always contain some flaws. For works of any length, there comes a point when your continued tinkering won't improve the whole, but will just trade one set of problems for another.

  Bruce Holland Rogers

  Art, Book, Perfect

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• Alexis Coe rescues a buried but extraordinarily telling episode from the 1890s that resonates in all sorts of ways with today. That in itself would be an accomplishment. But this is a book that is truly riveting, a narrative that gallops. Lizzy Borden eat your heart out. Here’s a real crime of passion. Or was it? I dare you to pick this one up and try, just try to put it down.

  Peter Orner

  Real, Book, Passion

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• More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.

  Walter Isaacson

  Romantic, Jobs, Book

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• But most of all I was inspired by the stirring examples of all the other runners. In some pictures they would seem like tiny dots in a mosaic, but each had a separate narrative starting a few months or a lifetime earlier and finishing that day in the New York City Marathon, the race with 37,000 stories.

  Mark Sutcliffe

  Running, New York, Cities

  Mark Sutcliffe (2013). “Why I Run: The Remarkable Journey of the Ordinary Runner”, p.70, eBookIt.com

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• 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

  Ifs And, Dictatorship, Justification

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2016). “Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile”, p.1719, Random House

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• Poetry, above all is a series of intense moments ­ its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing
  with emotion.

  Carol Ann Duffy

  Intense Moments, Facts, Emotion

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• I wanted to tell the story of these women and the war in the Congo and I couldn't find anything about them in the newspapers or in the library, so I felt I had to get on a plane and go to Africa and find the story myself. I felt there was a complete absence in the media of their narrative. It's very different now, but when I went in 2004 that was definitely the case.

  Lynn Nottage

  War, Media, Library

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• I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.

  Janet Evanovich

  Long, Want, Reader

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• Given the realities of the U.S. criminal justice system, the prosecution may be unable to salvage this case. But just because that system fails victims on the regular doesn't mean we have to, too. French commentators are already calling for DSK to jump back into the country's presidential race and ride a wave of sympathy into office. Really, the stakes are greater than even that political prize. If we accept the narrative that only perfect women are raped, we risk sacrificing justice not only for this woman, but for victims of sexual assault everywhere. After all, nobody's perfect.

  Jaclyn Friedman

  Country, Mean, Sacrifice

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• 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

  Real, Order, Brain

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• Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Past, Way, Return

  "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?". Book by Jeanette Winterson (Page 58), www.huffingtonpost.com. 2011.

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• What I learned is, we have to listen to each other, even when we don't agree, even when we think we hate each other. We have to listen to each others narratives. Not interrupt defensively, or with hostility, but really try to open our hearts and listen with empathy. I learned so much from that meeting. It was a very difficult thing to do and it was one of the best things that I ever did in my life. Look what scares you in the face, and try to understand it. Empathy, I have learned, is revolutionary.

  Jane Fonda

  Hate, Heart, Thinking

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• Unlike scandal-monger Ed Klein’s fantastical No. 1 best-selling narrative about the supposed Blood Feud between the Clintons and the Obamas, Halper’s study is juicy and gossipy, yet scrupulously researched, drawing on numerous on-the-record conversations (as well as many not-for-attribution interviews) with prominent Democrats and Clinton insiders, past and present.

  Lloyd Grove

  Past, Blood, Drawing

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• On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection - most dreams are bungled - the are symbolic chains of scene and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed when we remember our dreams.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Dream, Morning, Expectations

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• Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.

  Dennis Lehane

  Jobs, Writing, Focus

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• You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.

  Andrew Solomon

  Motivational, Hurt, Self

  "How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are". TED Talk, www.ted.com. March 2014.

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• I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.

  Darren Aronofsky

  Theme, Filmmaking, Mantras

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

  David O. Russell

  Song, Thinking, Intense Moments

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• The strange, wonderful stories of Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain introduce us to the tremendously gifted Kirsten Menger-Anderson, a writer whose subject is nothing less than the diagnosis and cure of the human malady. We follow twelve generations of New York City's Steenwycks family through their forays into phrenology, mesmerism, radium therapy and similar misadventures, a historically rich narrative that Menger-Anderson delivers in striking, elegant prose and with a sure eye for detail. This is a remarkable debut by a writer to watch.

  Ben Fountain

  New York, Eye, Cities

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