Narrative Quotes - Page 40

• I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

  Claudia Rankine

  Optimistic, Past, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• One of the things that bugs me about the Western Literary Tradition is that the conventions of narrative in particular seem to confine the stories you can tell about characters to tropes of bone-headed action and old models of psychological realism. And as readers, too, we have been conditioned to understand characters as - and forgive me for saying it out loud - what the market says they should be. Namely, safe, clean, proper.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Character, Forgive Me, Forgiving

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander - and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters - but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters' bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Real, Character, Example

  Source: therumpus.net

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• What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Art, Firsts, Fiction

  "There Is No Real Life". Interview with Brad Fox, www.guernicamag.com. March 15, 2013.

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• Independent of politics, the changing narrative on immigration is directly correlated to the fact that we have new technologies that are allowing people to talk to each other and tell their own stories and organize themselves.

  Jose Antonio Vargas

  Independent, Technology, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The tremendous challenge of narrative journalism about subjects that are underreported is, how do you make people care about something they think they already know about, or think they don't need to know about?

  Sarah Stillman

  Thinking, People, Challenges

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Thinking through how you find that intersection between individual, compelling human narratives and structural, systemic injustices - that's the place that's most interesting to me as a reporter.

  Sarah Stillman

  Thinking, Interesting, Injustice

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I tend to gravitate toward the "act two," or "act three," or "act four" stories - either things that are underreported, where we think we already know the common narrative, or things that are at the margins of an over-reported story, where we're all so focused in one direction that we're missing something crucial that's unfolding off to the side.

  Sarah Stillman

  Thinking, One Direction, Two

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If we are not in conflict with Palestine than why are they so afraid of us presenting Palestinian voices? Of course the answer is obvious, and we see it throughout the U.S. and the world, controlling the master narrative of Israel means vigilantly controlling the narrative about Palestine.

  Jon Rubin

  Mean, Israel, Voice

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I suppose the short chapters and differing narrative points of view are quite "cinematic" devices, which came very naturally to me.

  Stef Penney

  Views, Chapters, Point Of View

  Stef Penney (2008). “The Tenderness of Wolves: A Novel”, p.385, Simon and Schuster

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• I need to tell the things that are important but which don't make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.

  Akhil Sharma

  Mean, Writing, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.

  Akhil Sharma

  Children, Able, Firsts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Art in the United States is a kind of visual entertainment focusing on expected narratives.

  Massimiliano Gioni

  Art, Entertainment, United States

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Even if I made pornography, the trauma would show, though. It will always be there because it's my verité. It's my kind of narrative, it's my kind of storytelling. It's not style; it's just there.

  Lav Diaz

  Style, Kind, Storytelling

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• You [can] become part of someone else's narrative. Every once in a while I would get people asking me questions like, "If your husband is a Muslim, then why haven't you converted to Islam?" Interestingly enough, almost every person who asked me that was a Sunni, and it was their not-so-subtle way of implying that my Shiite husband was a bad Muslim for letting his infidel wife run around unconverted.

  Annia Ciezadlo

  Running, Husband, Wife

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I like to move around in the landscape between poetry and prose, between the lyrical and the narrative.

  Rigoberto Gonzalez

  Moving, Landscape, Lyrical

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I love narrative and sometimes I feel frustrated with stand-up.

  Rachel Zucker

  Frustrated, Sometimes, Feels

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I like a narrative, even if it's fractured, or kind of psychedelic. But my favorite thing is if I hear words and I close my eyes and the connotations or the image I get in my head, combine with the sound of them - sometimes phonetics. I'm just stringing those together.

  Stephen Malkmus

  Eye, Together, Sound

  Source: therumpus.net

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• With some songs, I have written narratives or I've tried to carry it through, but generally the things that were more genius, as far as I was concerned, were not that.

  Stephen Malkmus

  Song, Genius, Concerned

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The narrative songs were well-written, like an article in The New Yorker. They're nice and pat. They're more like I'm just showing I can do that when I write a song like that. It's not my true calling.

  Stephen Malkmus

  Song, Nice, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Because for me to go fully experimental, it would turn into an artist book actually. And I'm not opposed to that. But I wanted to toy with the conventions of traditional narrative and sometimes to do that all the way, you have to actually utilize traditional narrative, I think - or it's one way to do it.

  Porochista Khakpour

  Book, Thinking, Artist

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I used to teach writing in a federal prison, and for my students' benefit, I would liken the narrative use of this highly personal point of view to a boxer's getting in close to his opponent.

  Norman Lock

  Writing, Views, Use

  Source: therumpus.net

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• A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end.

  Norman Lock

  Character, Voice, Progress

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I really like narrative songs, but I wonder if that's a thing for some people. Once they've heard the story, do they really need to hear the story again?

  Craig Finn

  Song, People, Needs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 've always defined a truly alluring story as a journey we're not equipped to take ourselves with a person we're tempted but afraid to emulate. Impostor narratives are exactly that. When they end in disaster, as Clark's did, or as Gatsby's did, we can congratulate ourselves for our own wisdom. We can also experience, safely, at no cost, the terrible thrill of radical self-invention, of trading who we are for who we might be.

  Walter Kirn

  Journey, Self, Might

  Source: therumpus.net

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