267 Quotes About Narrative

I want the reader to get the feeling that the text is trying to rearrange itself, upon every reading or in the act of reading. I don't want the presentation of narrative; I want a life told out of order.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

Ugwu fumbled, awkwardly, for something to say. ‘Are you still writing your book, sah?’‘No.’‘”The World Was Silent When We Died”. It is a good title.’‘Yes, it is. It came from something Colonel Madu said once.’Richard paused. ‘The war isn’t my story to tell, really.’Ugwu nodded. He had never thought that it was.

Reading stories forces us to exercise our empathy and imagination muscles, and that helps us conceive what the Bible depicts or demands, helps us connect with others, helps us illustrate what the text teaches, and helps us apply the text’s truths.

Writers use narratives to select from everything there is, and make contexts by putting the pieces into relation; that’s what writers do, they make contexts.

I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity

A long list of propositions does not necessarily make a coherent argument

The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances [...].

What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? 'Tell me a story.' That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. [179]