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78bae98 There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. heartbreak love moment narrative Douglas Adams
503f538 No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. history humanity memory narrative reality semiotics story truthful words Roger Zelazny
ac95af4 To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative -- the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. escape escapism fiction interpretation narrative reading real-world storytelling Umberto Eco
d33fe5d Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story's silent twin. There are so many things that we can't say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent. Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself. narrative silence storytelling trauma truth Jeanette Winterson
9afcbfa The Princess Bride S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone had a chance to read it. authors funny high-expectations narrative princess-bride william-goldman William Goldman
fc52d0f Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent. fiction narrative stories storytelling Oliver Sacks
1a4f200 Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories. jesus narrative story theology Madeleine L'Engle
a6bf587 Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. literary-criticism literary-theory narrative nineteenth-century novels plot postmodernism reading semiotics victorians Jeffrey Eugenides
6a07491 What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences. disappearance intelligence language narrative Terry Tempest Williams
40aed20 I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything. gertrude-stein narration narrative writing Gertrude Stein
71d9bba You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers. empathy-psychology narrative narratology stories Julian Barnes
1101b30 In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything. corruption imperialism narrative power Chinua Achebe
8f94395 "The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story." imagination narrative storytelling Pat Conroy
8fff1c2 The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you - and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something IS missing. That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille. birth life longing-for-death narrative nostalgia opening Jeanette Winterson
00fc684 The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment. Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment with music and dancing--suddenly, with music, they know how to move. We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music--the sequence of movements they cannot hold as schemes being perfectly holdable as music, i.e. embedded in music. The same may be seen, very dramatically, in patients with severe frontal lobe damage and apraxia--an inability to do things, to retain the simplest motor sequences and programmes, even to walk, despite perfectly preserved intelligence in all other ways. This procedural defect, or motor idiocy, as one might call it, which completely defeats any ordinary system of rehabilitative instruction, vanishes at once if music is the instructor. All this, no doubt, is the rationale, or one of the rationales, of work songs. essential music narrative therapy Oliver Sacks
58d8b67 Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. narrative trust unspoken writer Jeanette Winterson
8e972dd "The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth (Niels Bohr)." By this, he means that we require a larger reading of the human past, of our relations with each other, the universe and God, a retelling of our older tales to encompass many truths and to let us grow with change." narrative past physics truth Neil Postman
c6df86f That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately--ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors--coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sue generous explorations. narrative place Rebecca Solnit
f1fa711 I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are. arbitrariness narrative Samuel Beckett
45c13f2 All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not udnerstand the idea of as tory. The dungeon was static, eternal, black and a story needed motion adn tiem and light. He felt his story slipping away from him, beocming inconsequential, ceasing to be. He has no story. There was no story. He was not a man. There was no man here. There was only the dungeon, and the slithering dark. medical-humanities narrative story Salman Rushdie
02e0dc7 All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot. don-delillo love narrative plots plotting politics terrorism white-noise Don DeLillo
d71b68e "It might be most dramatically effective to begin the tale at the moment when Arnold Baffin rang me up and said, "Bradley, could you come round here please, I think I have just killed my wife." dramatic iris-murdoch meta narrative narrator opening storytelling the-black-prince Iris Murdoch
acf7866 Christianity tells a big story. It allows us to see our own story in a new way. narrative regeneration renewal story-telling Alister E. McGrath
7230b8d By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth, Lyotard relativizes (secular) philosophy's claim to autonomy and so grants the legitimacy of a philosophy that grounds itself in Christian faith. Previously such a distinctly Christian philosophy would have been exiled from the 'pure' arena of philosophy because of its 'infection' with bias and prejudice. Lyotard's critique, however, demonstrates that no philosophy - indeed, no knowledge - is untainted by prejudice or faith commitments. In this way the playing field is leveled, and new opportunities to voice a Christian philosophy are created. Thus Lyotard's postmodern critique of metanarratives, rather than being a formidable foe of Christian faith and thought, can in fact be enlisted as an ally in the construction of a Christian philosophy. christianity knowledge lyotard metanarrative narrative objectivity philosophy prejudice the-enlightenment James K.A. Smith
bc9eeeb Discipline is aimed at formation for a specific end, and that end is determined by our founding narrative. narrative worldview James K.A. Smith
6fa6134 My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head...if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes, and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence. narrative philosophical Jean-Paul Sartre
a765b3d "Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: "Tell the history of our time through the people who make it." leadership motivation narrative storytelling writing Walter Isaacson
db4cce2 Through history it's the novelist who has felt affinity for the violent man who lives in the dark. Where are your sympathies? With the colonial police, the occupier, the rich landlord, the corrupt government, the militaristic state? Or with the terrorist? narrative novelization Don DeLillo
f80c234 Stories were heirlooms in these parts. inspiration leadership legacy motivation narrative parenthood storytelling Robert Kurson
2a6306c Then the front doorbell (already too long delayed by my rambling narrative) rang. iris-murdoch meta narrative narrator self-deprecating the-black-prince Iris Murdoch
67fbacd There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one can't explain without handing over a full map of one's life, unfolding it, making clear that all the lines and contours stand for long days and nights when things were bad or good, or when things were too small to be described at all: when things just were. This is a life. narrative storytelling Colm Tóibín
398fe1c New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. narrative story Valeria Luiselli
2442779 Agora penso que e verdade, como se costuma dizer - disse Mahamut -, que o que a gente sabe sentir sabe dizer, mesmo que algumas vezes a emocao emudeca a lingua. experience narrative Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
e31230d Arguments, speculation-- conspiracy theories of all kind. The usual thing, right? No one is ever simply assassinated any more. Ever since your Kennedys, it is always a matter of how many stories you can invent to explain the same body of facts. That is the great pleasure of conspiracy theory--not explanation, but narrative. It is like Scheherazade. conspiracy-theories facts narrative Kim Stanley Robinson
6de872d Agora penso que e verdad, como se costuma dizer - disse Mahamut -, que o que a gente sabe sentir sabe dizer, mesmo que algumas vezes a emocao emudeca a lingua. experience narrative Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
4ce5642 A story is nothing more than a reproduction of the order of the world on a purely verbal scale. A replica of life, if life consisted of words. But life does not consist just of words. Unfortunately, it is also made up of bodies or, in other words, of disease, pain and death. narrative story Ricardo Piglia
b1e0fc0 Lewis wanted us to understand that the inner world is shaped by stories. narrative thought-life Alister E. McGrath
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