Narrative Quotes - Page 17

• The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.

  Charles Stross

  Real, Order, Brain

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• Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Past, Way, Return

  "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?". Book by Jeanette Winterson (Page 58), www.huffingtonpost.com. 2011.

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• What I learned is, we have to listen to each other, even when we don't agree, even when we think we hate each other. We have to listen to each others narratives. Not interrupt defensively, or with hostility, but really try to open our hearts and listen with empathy. I learned so much from that meeting. It was a very difficult thing to do and it was one of the best things that I ever did in my life. Look what scares you in the face, and try to understand it. Empathy, I have learned, is revolutionary.

  Jane Fonda

  Hate, Heart, Thinking

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• Unlike scandal-monger Ed Klein’s fantastical No. 1 best-selling narrative about the supposed Blood Feud between the Clintons and the Obamas, Halper’s study is juicy and gossipy, yet scrupulously researched, drawing on numerous on-the-record conversations (as well as many not-for-attribution interviews) with prominent Democrats and Clinton insiders, past and present.

  Lloyd Grove

  Past, Blood, Drawing

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• On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection - most dreams are bungled - the are symbolic chains of scene and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed when we remember our dreams.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Dream, Morning, Expectations

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• Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.

  Dennis Lehane

  Jobs, Writing, Focus

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• You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.

  Andrew Solomon

  Motivational, Hurt, Self

  "How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are". TED Talk, www.ted.com. March 2014.

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• I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.

  Darren Aronofsky

  Theme, Filmmaking, Mantras

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.

  David O. Russell

  Song, Thinking, Intense Moments

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• The strange, wonderful stories of Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain introduce us to the tremendously gifted Kirsten Menger-Anderson, a writer whose subject is nothing less than the diagnosis and cure of the human malady. We follow twelve generations of New York City's Steenwycks family through their forays into phrenology, mesmerism, radium therapy and similar misadventures, a historically rich narrative that Menger-Anderson delivers in striking, elegant prose and with a sure eye for detail. This is a remarkable debut by a writer to watch.

  Ben Fountain

  New York, Eye, Cities

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• The unique, compelling, and earnest voice that characterizes Jedediah’s weekly columns comes alive with increased vitality in OUTNUMBERED. She shatters leftist stereotypes about conservatives and exposes the myth of liberal tolerance as she relates her interactions with liberals in everyday life. This narrative, interlaced with commentary and impressions, gives us insight into liberals that books merely about abstract principles do not capture. A fascinating read.

  David Limbaugh

  Book, Unique, Voice

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• Gesture will survive whatever kind of light you have. Gesture can triumph over anything because of its narrative content.

  Jay Maisel

  Photography, Light, Triumph

  Jay Maisel (2014). “Light, Gesture, and Color”, p.2, New Riders

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• For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.

  Siegfried Sassoon

  Book, Narrators, Fading

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• It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

  David Brooks

  Simple, Would Be, Rise Of China

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• Incredibly deep research combines with the talents of a fine historian and writer to produce superb narrative history. The true character and relationship of these two iconic westerners emerge to suppress myth and correct more than a century of tomes laden with bad history.

  Robert M. Utley

  Character, Two, Research

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• Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative.

  Todd Haynes

  Film, Linear, Parallels

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• We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.

  Lydia Davis

  Memories, Character, Ongoing

  "Lydia Davis: I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters". Interview with Sarah Manguso, www.believermag.com. January, 2008.

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• I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

  Alan Furst

  Book, Past, Thinking

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• There's a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It's a narrative of hope.

  Bruce Feiler

  Stories, Inspired, Reason

  "God and Dad: A Father’s Four Lessons of Faith" by Bruce Feiler, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 18, 2010.

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• The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.

  Jane Campion

  Struggle, Writing, Piano

  "New Again: Jane Campion". Interview with Katherine Dieckmann, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 30, 2012.

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• I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds.

  Michael Cunningham

  Movie Love, Television, Kind

  "Michael Cunningham: A life in writing" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. February 7, 2011.

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• My mom used to tell me stories at night, read books to me - and I read 'em over and over and over again. And you know what I learned from that? I went back and looked at everything - Why do I like reading the same stories over and over and over again? What, was I some kind of nincompoop? No - the narrative gave me connection with my mom.

  Peter Guber

  Mom, Book, Reading

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• Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.

  Barry Hannah

  Pain, Joy, Ongoing

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• These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.

  Hari Kunzru

  Thinking, Play, People

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• A lot of Broadway has that immigrant narrative of America as a place where you can become something else against all odds.

  Deborah Kass

  Odds, America, Broadway

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