Narrative Quotes

• The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.

  Edward Norton

  Documentaries, Kind, Film

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• Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.

  Steven Pinker

  Psychology, Mind, Woven

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• You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Thinking, Gaps, Stories

  "There Is No Real Life". Interview with Brad Fox, www.guernicamag.com. March 15, 2013.

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• People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.

  E. O. Wilson

  People, Needs, Purpose

  "E.O. Wilson Is on Top of the World". Interview with Jill Neimark, www.psychologytoday.com. September 1, 1998.

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• Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.

  David Antin

  Different, Stories

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• The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

  Scott Turow

  Purpose, Ambiguity, Complexity

  "'To hell with Perry Mason'". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. November 24, 2002.

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• Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.

  Jane Smiley

  Dark, Firsts, Sometimes

  "The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt - review" by Jane Smiley, www.theguardian.com. July 15, 2011.

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• A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

  John Updike

  Wall, Writing, Doors

  John Updike (2009). “More Matter: Essays and Criticism”, p.183, Random House

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• We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

  Paul Auster

  Reality, People, Personality

  1989 In the Sunday Times,16 Apr.

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• Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder

  Paul Ricoeur

  Order, Identity, Stories

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• I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

  James Gunn

  Moving, Writing, Successful

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• It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Drama, Adventure, Character

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• The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.

  Hans Urs von Balthasar

  Passion, Unity, Pieces

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• It's actually pretty complex, because there's two levels of reality in the narrative. One is what really took place, and the other is Spider's poisoned version of what took place.

  Gabriel Byrne

  Reality, Two, Spiders

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• Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Depth, Height, Action

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• To have frequent recourse to narrative betrays great want of imagination.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Imagination, Betrayed, Want

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.101, Oxford University Press

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• Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.

  Peter Straub

  Taken, Events, Taking Things For Granted

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• The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it.

  Robert Coover

  Imagine, Impulse

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• True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

  Don DeLillo

  Narrative Structure, Vision, Literature

  Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.84, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.

  Paul Ricoeur

  Character, Identity, Stories

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• Most religions live from a narrative that shapes their relationship with the divine other, God or the gods, and with the human other, the stranger.

  Timothy Radcliffe

  Relationship, Shapes, Stranger

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• My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible.

  George Armstrong Custer

  Truth, Purpose, Truthful

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• First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai.

  Paul Ricoeur

  Mouths, Firsts, Old Testament

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• The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction — there are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome.

  Marco Tempest

  Motivation, Inspiration, Loss

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• Director Gary Ross has created an adaptation that is faithful in both narrative and theme, but he's also brought a rich and powerful vision of Panem, its brutality and excesses, to the film as well. His world building's fantastic, whether it be the Seam or the Capitol.

  Suzanne Collins

  Powerful, Faithful, Vision

  "Suzanne Collins Talks About the Hunger Games Movie" by Kara McGrath, www.seventeen.com. March 1, 2012.

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