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Narratives Quotes

Browse 44 quotes about Narratives.

Narratives Quotes

“It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.”

BookStoriesWisdomHumorFunnyPainSufferingQuotesLiteratureUnderstandingGriefEducationConsciousnessFictionKnowledgeNovelLearningToo MuchSadnessAwarenessIgnoranceHumourBooksSorrowDespairPerceptionHeartbreakJokesHumorousCapacityAccountsMiseryEntertainmentAppreciationIgnorantCommandEducatedRealizationNarrativeAccomplishmentHeartacheTortureAuthorWriterEnlightenedSatireStoryWritersUnhappinessCapabilityMasteryNonfictionAcceptableAphorismEntertainingAgonyDistressQuotationsJokeTormentEssaysHilariousEscapeUnbearableDiscomfortAuthorsUnderstandKnowExpertiseScholarshipComprehensionAphorismsSchoolingEscapismApprehensionCognitionKnowledgeableIlliterateDesolationEssaySkillUneducatedTolerableWretchednessManageableWell EducatedScholarlyAphoristAphoristsOverpoweringInsufferableUninformedEruditeUnendurableEruditionProficiencyLearnedNarrativesComprehendAccountEntertainGraspSustainableUnacceptableWell ReadInexperiencedCultivatedCulturedIntolerableWell InformedCognizanceUnschooledUnsophisticatedEndurableInsupportableUnworldlyMan Of LettersUnknowledgeableUnreadUntrainedVia DolorosaAdeptnessAdmissibleBe Acquainted WithBe Conversant WithBe Familiar WithBe Up To Speed OnBe Versed InBenightedBrookableExpertnessHave A Grasp OfHave Knowledge OfHave LearnedHave MasteredHave MemorizedKnowledgableMen Of LettersSufferableSupportableUnenlightenedUnlearnedUnletteredUnmanageableUntaughtUntutoredWoman Of LettersWomen Of Letters
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“So much of the story we tell about history is really the story that we tell about ourselves, about our mothers and our fathers and their mothers and their fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. Throughout our lives we are told certain stories and they are stories that we choose to believe--stories that become embedded in our identities in ways we are not always fully cognizant of. For many of the people I met at Blandford, the story of the Confederacy is the story of their home, of their family--and the story of their family is the story of them. So when they are asked to reckon with the fact that their ancestors fought a war to keep my ancestors enslaved, there is resistance to facts that have been documented by primary sources and contemporaneous evidence. They are forced to confront the lies they have upheld. They are forced to confront the flaws of their ancestors. As Greg Stewart, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told the New York Times in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston massacre, "You're asking me to agree that my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents were monsters." Accepting such a reality would, for them, mean the deterioration of a narrative that has long been a part of their lineage, and the disintegration of so much of who they believed themselves to be in the world. But as I think of Blandford, I'm left wondering if we are all just patchworks of the stories we've been told. What would it take--what does it take--for you to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life? Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been? Just because something is difficult to accept doesn't mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn't make that story true.”

StoriesTruthHistoryRacismLiesSlaveryFamiliesNarrativesConfederacyFamily Stories
Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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“Men of war will always create narratives that serve to justify the unjustifiable horrors of terror unleashed. And a man of peace will know that to argue the narrative is to further feed that narrative in the minds of those who created it, thereby heightening the horrors that those narratives justify. Therefore, a man of peace must destroy the narrative by utilizing the very horrors that they justify.”

WarConflictLiesBattlesDictatorsNarrativesWorld WarJustificationsMen Of PeaceMen Of War
Author:Craig D. Lounsbrough
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“The reason why I am hopeful is because what we're now seeing is the formation of a new narrative struggle. When you're enslaved, you have to focus on freedom. When you're being terrorized and lynched, you have to focus on security. When you're disenfranchised and you don't have any opportunities for education and other businesses, you have to focus on civil rights. Now we're at a moment where we are in the beginnings of a narrative struggle. The reason why I'm hopeful is that earlier, even in my career, we didn't have thousands of committed journalists and professionals and storytellers and filmmakers and writers who could participate in this narrative structure. We have never been better situated to win the next phase of this struggle toward a just America than we are right now.”

StoriesAmericaHopeJusticeOptimismStorytellingAfrican AmericansBlacksNarratives
Author:Bryan Stevenson
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“What we want from a career narrative is some moral thrust, some meaningful story we can, as [Richard] Sennett suggests, tell our children. The old narrative was “I worked hard and therefore succeeded” or sometimes “I screwed up and therefore failed.” But a life of only intermittently rewarded effort—working hard only to be laid off, and then repeating the process until aging forecloses decent job offers—requires more strenuous forms of explanation. Either you look for the institutional forces shaping your life, or you attribute the unpredictable ups and downs of your career to an infinitely powerful, endlessly detail-oriented God.”

GodStoriesJobsCareersWorkingNarrativesCareer NarrativesInstitutional ForcesIntermittenceRichard Sennett
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“Life consists of many different stories. A person has not just one but countless life stories that weave in between each other and together create exactly that specific life and that specific human being.”

StoriesLife LessonsHuman BeingsLivingNarratives
Book:The Danish Way of Parenting: What the Happiest People in the World Know About Raising Confident, Capable Kids
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“And by this time the Chinese box was peeling crazily, and as each layer fell away a new voice told a new tale, none of the tales finished because the box inevitably found a new story inside each unfinished one, until it seemed that digression was the true principle of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing, and how could anyone live in a crazy situation in which nothing remained the same for five minutes and no narrative was ever driven through to its conclusion, there could be no meaning in such an environment, only absurdity, the unmeaningness that was the only sort of meaning anyone could hold on to.”

StoriesChangeMeaningUnfinishedNarrativesDigressionsUnfinished StoriesUnmeaningness
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“Essayist and poets share many of the same alluring keystrokes, even if they are rather rabid about asserting their notable pedigree differences. The writer and the poet use the juxtaposition of words to create a lovely portrayal of the touches of sweetness and the bitter edges of life. By doing so, they clarify and affirm the bewildering array of inconsistencies, ironies, absurdities, delights, and enigmas that describe what it entails to be fully alive. Each artistic form serves the same essential purpose, which is to investigate, ponder, and explain the bouquets of comedy and tragedy, covenants of love and mercy, and stones of anger and hatred that compulsory merger contextualize human life. By linking words that explore the chaos and silence within all of nature, essayists and poets’ labor serves to uplift the author and inspire their brethren.”

PoetsMemoir WritingWriting MemoirPoets And PoetryPersonal EssaysEssayistNarrativesNarrative Writing
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“A shaman and a writer each serve as their communities’ seers by engaging in extraordinary acts of conscientious study of the past and the present and predicting the future. An inner voice calls to the shaman and an essayistic writer to answer the call that vexes the pernicious spirit of their times. Shamanistic writers induce a trance state of mind where they lose contact with physical reality through a rational disordering of the senses, in an effort to encounter for the umpteenth time the great unknown and the unutterable truths that structure existence. An afflicted person seeking clarification of existence cannot ignore the shamanistic calling of narrative exposition. Thus, I shall continue this longwinded howl – making a personal immortality vessel – into the darkness of night forevermore.”

WritingSelf DiscoveryMemoirStorytellingNarrativeWritersAutobiographyWriters On WritingWriting ProcessEssaysWriting LifeJourney Of LifeMemoir WritingLife StoryImmoralityStory Of My LifeWriting PhilosophyMemoirsShamanismStorytellersWriters On ThinkingPersonal EssaysEssayistJourney Of Self DiscoveryStory Of Your LifeShamanNarrativesEssay WritingStory Of LifeNarrative WritingWriters On Writing BooksWriters VoiceStory Of A SoulShamanic JourneyingShamansJourney Of BecomingShamanism HealingImmortality Of The SoulJourney Of The SoulNarrative IdentityShamanic HealingShamanicJourney Of FaithJourney Of Your LifeImmorality Quotes
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Context is everything in both narrative and real life, and while the accusation is never that these creators deliberately set out to discriminate against gay and female characters, the unavoidable implication is that they should have known better than to add to the sum total of those stories which, en masse, do exactly that. And if the listmakers can identify the trend so thoroughly – if, despite all the individual qualifications, protests and contextualisations of the authors, these problems can still be said to exist – then the onus, however disconnected from the work of any one individual, nonetheless falls to those individuals, in their role as cultural creators, to acknowledge the problem; to do better next time; perhaps even to apologise. This last is a particular sticking point. By and large, human beings tend not to volunteer apologies for things they perceive to be the fault of other people, for the simple reason that apology connotes guilt, and how can we feel guilty – or rather, why should we – if we’re not the ones at fault? But while we might argue over who broke a vase, the vase itself is still broken, and will remain so, its shards ground into the carpet, until someone decides to clean it up. Blog Post: Love Team Freezer”

WritingCriticismYaMinoritiesNarratives
Author:Foz Meadows
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“The most dangerous stories we make up are the narratives that diminish our inherent worthiness. We must reclaim the truth about our lovability, divinity, and creativity. Lovability: Many of my research participants who had gone through a painful breakup or divorce, been betrayed by a partner, or experienced a distant or uncaring relationship with a parent or family member spoke about responding to their pain with a story about being unlovable—a narrative questioning if they were worthy of being loved. This may be the most dangerous conspiracy theory of all. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past thirteen years, it’s this: Just because someone isn’t willing or able to love us, it doesn’t mean that we are unlovable.”

PsychologySelf HelpMental HealthPersonal DevelopmentSelf WorthNarrativeWorthinessNarrativesPersonal NarrativeLovability
Book:Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution
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“Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But to the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game.”

TruthScienceKnowledgeThoughtPostmodernismScientismNarrativesLanguage GameMetanarratives
Book:The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
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“When we recount our own tales we focus on the features that to us loom large and omit the ones that to us seem irrelevant. Studies show that it is likely that we do this early on, when we first give linguistic shape to our narrative, such that over time we don’t even see ourselves as exaggerating or minimizing.”

StorytellingTruthsNarrativesLife HistoryDominant Story
Book:One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery
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“...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get. See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On. The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour. And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.”

AmericaFantasyBlogNarrativesHerosMythcon
Author:Catherynne M. Valente
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“It may seem strange that people who have already obtained a position of power through violence, invest so much time into justifying their plunder with words. But even plunderers are human beings, whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves, and those they seek to throttle and rob.”

SlaveryNarrativesSystems Of Oppression
Book:The Message
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“I would write: "The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the split yam." Or: "The child's clumsy fingers fumbled in sleep, feeling vainly for the wish of its dream." "The old man huddled in the dark doorway, his bony face lit by the burning yellow in the windows of distant skycrapers." My purpose was to capture a physical state or movement that carried a strong subjective impression, an accomplishment which seemed supremely worth struggling for. If I could fasten the mind of the reader upon words so firmly that he would forget words and be conscious only of his response, I felt that I would be in sight of knowing how to write narrative.”

Writing ProcessWriting AdviceOn WritingNarrativesSwooning Over Sentences
Book:Black Boy
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“Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost.”

FactsStoriesRealityTruthAmericaNationsDemocracyNarratives
Author:George Packer
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“When these red flags appeared early on, the narrative was “shaped” in a way that was at times romantic, passionate, and even practical. The old saying of “love is blind” applies here, and before these patterns set in, hope is often what allows people to look the other way when the red flags arise. Over time, the narratives become a bit more realistic, hope begins to fade, and it becomes brutally clear that these patterns of mistrust, anger, and deceit are here to stay. A human relationship should not be built on what you can do for someone, but simply on a mutual partnership. A narcissistic relationship can often devolve into superficial attributes, such as jobs, schools, titles, resources, addresses, photo-shopped images, status posts, quiet children, well-appointed homes, and possessions.”

RealityHopeRelationshipsMarriagePsychologyBreakupEngagementNarcissismReciprocityNarratives
Book:Should I Stay or Should I Go?: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist
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“When I am so certain—expressing my views, asserting my narrative, and moving my agenda forward—I cannot hear God. His voice is quiet; a whisper that is easily missed in the din and clamor of the world. But I will hear Him: either now (because I step away from my insistence that I am right) or in the end (because all of my nonsense will flee away in His presence). And when I hear Him, error will fall silent and truth will shine forth like the beautiful light of dawn after a dark and lonely night.”

GodLightTruthSilenceDarknessNoiseErrorNarratives
Author:Jean-Michel Hansen
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