| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c44cc75 | ... I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe--but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors--for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame--that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them... | memories unreliable-narrator memory | Gene Wolfe | |
| aa9dbdf | "Tate explained that James was able to achieve this magic through the use of the first-person narrator. Tate said that the first person is the most difficult form because the writer is locked inside the head of the narrator and can't get out. He can't say "meanwhile, back at the ranch" as a transition to another subject because he is imprisoned forever inside the narrator. But so is the reader! And that is the strength of the first-person narrative. The reader does not see that the governess is the villainess because what the governess sees is all the reader ever sees." | writing unreliable-narrator villain puzzle | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| 103d7ad | You might even ask me to apply my 'theory' to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I'm not sure I could answer this, to be honest. | truth reliability unreliable-narrator the-sense-of-an-ending julian-barnes meta truthfulness | Julian Barnes |