Narrative Quotes - Page 26

• Within a scantily plotted, novella-style narrative (the movie is an adaptation of a short story by Tom Bissell), single shots become story events that mere mention would spoil.

  Karina Longworth

  Style, Events, Stories

  7 Copy quote

• Narrative is the beginning of recovery.

  Amanda Ripley

  Recovery

  Amanda Ripley (2009). “The Unthinkable: Who survives when disaster strikes - and why”, p.12, Random House

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• With reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report always being tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other.

  Thucydides

  Memories, Eye, Hands

  "The History of the Peloponnesian War".

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Truth, Stories, Following

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.217, University of Georgia Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We think that it's the big moments that define our lives-the wedding, the baby, the new house, the dream job. But really, these big moments of happiness are just the punctuation marks of our personal sagas. The narrative is written every day in the small, the simple, and the common. In your tiny choices, in these tiny changes. In the unconsidered. The overlooked. The discarded. The reclaimed.

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Happiness, Dream, Baby

  Sarah Ban Breathnach (1999). “Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self”, G K Hall & Company

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• After all, it was only a story,' I said, determined to prove her wrong. 'All manner of terrible things may happen in a story. They may be startling at the time, but it passes. One gets caught up in the narrative, but the dangers aren't real, are they? Things happen in any way the storyteller chooses. It is all just made up.

  Chris Priestley

  Real, Stories, May

  Chris Priestley (2010). “Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth”, p.35, Bloomsbury Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment-nar rative catechisms.

  N.D. Wilson

  Needs, Catechism, Creatures

  5 Copy quote

• Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

  Toni Morrison

  Creating, Revolutionary, Moments

  Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture, delivered 7 December 1993

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The best stories are often true...The narrative of human life is most beautiful when told truthfully and without boundaries.

  Shonda Rhimes

  Life, Beautiful, Stories

  Glamour Women Of The Year speech, www.huffingtonpost.com. 2014.

  68 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are worries that seem to me sustained by the love of worry. For example, that people are reading from screens, or listening to recorded books. Why scold the impulse to enjoy language and narrative in whatever form it takes?

  Marilynne Robinson

  Book, Reading, Worry

  4 Copy quote

• If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable, rather than its literal narrative.

  Peter Morgan

  Distance, Events, Stories

  "The Fifth Estate: When biopic subjects strike back" by Will Morley, www.bbc.com. October 21, 2014.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.

  Susan Sontag

  Heart, Appetite For Life, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• John Lane has long been recognized as one of the South's finest poets and memoirists. This debut establishes him as one of our finest novelists as well. His poet's eye for detail seamlessly merges with a born storyteller's gift for narrative. Fate Moreland's Widow gives voice to those who endured one of the most painful and neglected chapters in American history.

  Ron Rash

  Eye, Fate, Voice

  27 Copy quote

• The most effective way to defeat patriarchy is to defy and disown its self-legitimating narrative.

  John Lamb Lash

  Self, Way, Defeat

  45 Copy quote

• For me, it’s like playing the same instrument but in a different context. TV work – it’s really about getting it just right. You have a chance to try again if it’s not. Theatre is like playing a rock show. It doesn’t really matter if you make a tiny mistake. It’s the whole vibe and getting people to feel you. It’s about carrying the moment through all the way with you in an hour and 20 minutes of the narrative.

  Evelyne Brochu

  Mistake, Rocks, People

  9 Copy quote

• Marie Houzelle is a master of the first-person narrative. In Tita she has created a strange, utterly original child whose deadpan certainties are a beguiling invitation to readers of all ages.

  Katharine Weber

  Children, Age, Firsts

  4 Copy quote

• The point is that the reader's journey through our site is a narrative experience. Our job is to make the narrative satisfying.

  Mark Bernstein

  Jobs, Journey, Internet

  4 Copy quote

• Rebellion is not going to go away...What has been unleashed, I think, can't be stopped...The importance of continuing acts of resistance is that it keeps this narrative alive...We speak a fundamental truth about this system that terrifies them.

  Chris Hedges

  Thinking, Going Away, Fundamentals

  11 Copy quote

• Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice - A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice.

  Alexander Pope

  Summer, Wise, War

  Alexander Pope (1830). “The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope (including His Translation of Homer). To which is Prefixed the Life of the Author, by Dr. Johnson”, p.233

  77 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do think the challenge, in a way for me, is to write a narrative film and when you finish watching it you feel like it's a collage. You tell the narrative, you tell the story, but you feel like you've created this tapestry. But it also has a shape, a story. So I think there's a middle ground that I try to strike... away from where everyone else seems ready to go, which is, setup, payoff. You know, He's afraid of water, oh, and at the end he's swimming in water - oh, my God. I hate that stuff.

  Shane Black

  Hate, Writing, Swimming

  "The Two Hollywoods: The Screenwriters; Shane Black; Harmony Korine". Interview with Harmony Korine, www.nytimes.com. November 16, 1997.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of Jesus which hung on Emilie's wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonisation of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved.

  Thomas Keneally

  Jesus, Wall, Passion

  Thomas Keneally (1982). “Schindler's list”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some write a narrative of wars and feats, Of heroes little known, and call the rant A history.

  William Cowper

  War, Hero, Writing

  William Cowper, Henry Stebbing (1839). “Poems with a Memoir of the Author by Henry Stebbing”, p.268

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature; and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind forever.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  History, Forever, Mind

  John Morley, Thomas B. Macaulay (2016). “Machiavelli : the Founder of the Political”, p.94, Editions Le Mono

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them. I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enables you to live, to do something. And sometimes, human beings need story and narrative more than they need nourishment and food.

  Emma Thompson

  Believe, Book, Thinking

  28 Copy quote

• The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Cold, Chemical Reactions, Chemicals

  "My Life's Sentences". opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. March 17, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source