Narrative Quotes - Page 25

McEwan's Atonement…truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past…. The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel…. There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes — the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression — into his narrative, and in a magical love scene.

Noah Richler

Art, Father, Writing

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What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one's literary standards should be.... a tour de force by one of England's best novelists.... Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel - and more satisfying... - than anything McEwan has written....sublimely written narrative.... The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own.

Noah Richler

Book, Writing, Joy

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If written in the three-letter words of the four-letter alphabet,a human being is determined by a genetic narrative long enough to fill the equivalent of 500 Bibles.In the meantime human beings have discovered this for themselves. That's right. They have uncovered our profoundest concept -- namely, that life is ultimately reading. They themselves are the Book of Books.

Harry Mulisch

Book, Reading, Long

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White guilt is more of a sanctioned social convention than a genuine emotional experience. It’s a form of theatrical empathy that’s socially and financially rewarded. When you learn to say and perhaps even believe the right things about race, doors are opened for you. When you say the wrong thing, those doors slam shut. Then, the gossips and church ladies will shame you publicly, demand that you be fired from your job, and use every avenue available to them to coerce a confession, a public apology and a staged conversion that contributes to their progressive narrative.

Jack Donovan

Jobs, Believe, Apology

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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

Space, Giving, Normal

John Berger (2009). “The Shape of a Pocket”, p.176, Vintage

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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

Change, Meaningful, Political

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[As a conductor] there has to be, between me and the orchestra, an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in.

Charles Hazlewood

Motivation, Believe, Inspiration

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Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, . . . for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it.

Paul Fussell

Liars, Technique, Fiction

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It’s not easy to find old-school journalism in true crime … yet with Lethal Intent, author Sue Russell proves how integrity, tenacity, brutal truth and honest reporting become essential components to what is a riveting—if not terrifying—narrative of America’s most hated ‘monster,’ Aileen Carol Wuornos. It’s not easy humanizing serial killers, but through an objective lens, clear and defined, Russell paints a graphic portrait of Wuornos’ evil intentions and rough life—a true page-turner, breathless, intense—but also important.

M. William Phelps

Integrity, School, America

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A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens-second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

Reynolds Price

Home, Opposites, Silence

Reynolds Price (1989). “A common room: essays, 1954-1987”, Scribner Paper Fiction

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I read Norman Lock’s The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain’s original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy—and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America’s greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive.

David Oshinsky

Winter, Boys, America

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The passion for the story is the wind in your narrative sails. Begin at the heart. We must hear the heartbeat of the story. Love your characters into existence.

Patricia Lee Gauch

Love You, Passion, Heart

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Many writers struggle with exposition in their novels. Often they heap it on in large chunks of straight narrative. Back story – what happens before the novel opens – is especially troublesome. How can we give the essentials and avoid a mere information drop?
Use dialogue. First, create a tension-filled scene, usually between two characters. Get them arguing, confronting each other. Then you can have the information appear in the natural course of things.

James Scott Bell

Struggle, Writing, Character

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Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.

Peter Greenaway

Cinema, Metaphor, Linear

Peter Greenaway, Vernon W. Gras (2000). “Peter Greenaway: Interviews”, p.98, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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Magicians are manipulating your consciousness. They are showing you something impossible. They're getting you to construct a narrative, which simply isn't true. So that means they know how to make you aware of certain things and blind to other things. What I'm hoping is that magic, this entertainment vehicle that has been around for a long time, will give us a real insight into the deep mysteries of consciousness

Richard Wiseman

Real, Mean, Long

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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

Two, Invisible, Surface

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I studied English Literature. I wasn’t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.

Christopher Nolan

College, Thinking, Literature

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

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Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely.

Ted Hughes

Healing, Doe, Etcetera

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If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure.

Lorrie Moore

Animal, Curiosity, Stories

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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

Destiny, Long, Isolated

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Do you dislike your role in the story, your place in the shadow? What complaints do you have that the hobbits could not have heaved at Tolkien? You have been born into a narrative, you have been given freedom. Act, and act well until you reach your final scene.

N.D. Wilson

Shadow, Finals, Roles

N. D. Wilson (2013). “Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World”, p.54, Thomas Nelson

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Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.

N.D. Wilson

Epic, Mountain Ranges, Self

N. D. Wilson (2013). “Death by Living: Life Is Meant to Be Spent”, p.6, Thomas Nelson Inc

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Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

Patricia Hampl

Humble, Night, Knitting

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The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

Anthony Doerr

Narrative Structure, Miracle, Chocolate

Anthony Doerr (2008). “Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World”, p.54, Simon and Schuster

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My paintings are loosely based on meta narratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still life's become personified, portraits become events, and landscapes become constructions. I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive.

Dana Schutz

Portraits, Events, Alive

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