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Narrative Quotes

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Narrative Quotes

“The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry — is not even a ”subject " — but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.”

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Author:Neil Postman
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“But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better.”

TryingSoulStoriesAbleSchoolEnergyPoorWatchesDangerousSweetStructureTemptationNarrativeTemptedUnlikelyHeadingsNarrative Structure
Book:Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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“History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82)”

IfsBelieveHumansMatterTogetherStuffKnownBloodMinutesMissingThousandTenSpeechNarrativeTapeHelplessTextureWisps
Book:Underworld: Picador Classic
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“It seems to me, that this, too, is how memory works. What we remember of what was done to us shapes our view, molds us, sets our stance. But what we remember is past, it no longer exists, and yet we hold on to it, live by it, surrender so much control to it. What do we become when we put down the scripts written by history and memory, when each person before us can be seen free of the cultural or personal narrative we've inherited or devised? When we, ourselves, can taste that freedom.”

PersonsDoneSeemsPastRememberMemoriesViewsWrittenTasteShapesScriptsSurrenderNarrativeLive ByMoldStanceHistory And Memory
Author:Rebecca Walker
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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

IfsLooksIdeasStoriesOrderChoicesSocialLinesMoralFiveLessonsMurderSuicideNarrativeMultipleSermonsShiftingSelectFreezeImpositionMultiple ChoiceMoral Lessons
Author:Joan Didion
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“Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.”

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Author:Michel Faber
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“While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.”

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Author:Geraldine Brooks
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“It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.”

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Author:Ian Mcewan
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“...for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family, and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways, immobile and thus unfettered.”

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Author:Matthew Tobin Anderson
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“I have been criticized throughout the course of my career for placing too much faith in the reliability of children's narratives; but I have almost always found that children are a great deal more reliable in telling us what actually goes on in public school than many of the adult experts who develop policies that shape their destinies.”

ChildrenHas BeensSchoolCoursesFoundDealsCareersDestinyToo MuchPolicyGoes OnShapesAdultsNarrativeExpertsPublic SchoolReliability
Book:The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
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“We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of "e pluribus unum.”

ShouldMovingTearsPrivilegeSeekingUpliftingPostsNarrativeRacistFascismFabricSuperiorityViciousRegisterBlacknessMoving Beyond
Book:April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death and How It Changed America
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“They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.”

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Book:The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A Novel
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“As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.”

IfsStoriesStepsIdentityThousandReflectionMirrorsStructureEndlessNarrativeSplitsGalleryDollsFragmentedRussian Dolls
Book:The Shadow Of The Wind
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“The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.”

ThinkingDoneBeautifulUsedTermLibertyBoysGoneEffectsDangerousLettersAddDialogueClarityNarrativeShockFlatsRulingVigorHogTedium
Author:Dorothy Parker
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“The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.”

WritingFirstsRealFormLanguageTermFictionElementsOriginalsNarrativeOperationsSignificanceDistributionRevealingExplicitPerversionEnigmaticContamination
Author:Brion Gysin
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“Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonize us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and nonfiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons that I don't fully understand, fiction dances out of me, and nonfiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”

ThinkingWorldWayBelieveDifferentReasonStoriesFictionMorningImagineBrokenWake UpTechniqueVanityNarrativeNonfictionImagine ThatEvery MorningFiction And NonfictionBroken World
Book:War Talk
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“Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.”

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Book:Bicycle Diaries
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“The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.”

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Author:Lorrie Moore
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“Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honey-moon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic - the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which make the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.”

YearsFirstsLittlesHas BeensStillsHomeAgeMemoriesLossCommonSweetMoonUnionsNarrativeWildernessHoneyAdamEpicHarvestConquestThornsEdenAdvancingAdam And EveClimaxMiddlemarchBourneThistlesSweet MemoriesGreat Beginnings
Book:Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
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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 afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.”

PeopleWayDoeFeelingsBigsLightSeemsHappensActionProcessOur LivesEventsMinesGoes OnFitFlowCamerasSoldierTraumaNarrativePlotSteadyLife Goes OnBig Events
Author:Jessica Stern
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“At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.”

MindTwoMatterStatesIndividualEnergyProcessMemoriesLevelsFocusChildhoodInformationEmotionalAspectFlowSecureNarrativeAttachmentAdulthoodProcessingNonverbalEnergy FlowInformation Processing
Author:Daniel J. Siegel
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“The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.”

IfsWritingCoursesProcessNovelPathJourneyCreatingTrainTrackTalesBoatDefinedNarrativeDestinationDiscoveringHighwaysDistractedTrain Tracks
Book:This Year You Write Your Novel
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“From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror.”

MayStatesMightEyeThreeBitsGoalDealsWonderEffectsCreationEmotionalParticularReaderBalanceHorrorAnxietyConcernHarmonyTerrorTalesPsychologicalPrimariesNarrativeDramaticShockDisplayInherentExaggerationMomentaryAmazementSophisticationWildnessDecorum
Author:Peter Straub
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