Narrative Quotes - Page 5

• 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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• 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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• We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Writing, Liberty, Facts

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Illustrated "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"”, p.325, Princeton University Press

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• I am often talking about the ideas collected in Normal Life in contexts that are not academic, or that are full of people who are not primarily engaging as theorists or theory-readers. Being able to make ideas visual, especially critical ideas about movements that can be difficult to hear because of attachments we have to certain national narratives, or because of ways that we see ourselves, is especially useful.

  Dean Spade

  Attachment, Talking, Ideas

  "On Normal Life". Interview with Natalie Oswin, societyandspace.org. January 15, 2014.

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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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• 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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• 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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• I'm handed a bunch of existing data. My job is to put that in the best narrative form. That is a puzzle I love to solve.

  Hilary Liftin

  Jobs, Data, Form

  "'Getting to Take on That Life Temporarily'". Interview with Kathryn Borel, Jr., logger.believermag.com. July 21, 2015.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Writing, Thinking, People

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• I learned there's an amazing unexplored territory in terms of narrative. Before, I thought the unexplored territory was the form, the way you shoot a movie. Now, I'm learning about the beautiful marriage between form and narrative.

  Alfonso Cuaron

  Beautiful, Territory, Way

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• I don't believe that narrative works when it's trying to teach a lesson or speak a factual truth.

  Shane Carruth

  Believe, Trying, Lessons

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• That decision to commit your life to certain principles and a certain narrative, if I wrote a paper on that, I know I'd find inconsistencies.

  Matt Stone

  Decision, Principles, Paper

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

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• The ninety percent of human experience that does not fit into established narrative patterns falls into oblivion.

  Mason Cooley

  Fall, Doe, Patterns

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• Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the Washington Post.

  Kara Swisher

  Posts, Reporters

  "Kara Swisher discusses life, D: All Things Digital". Interview with Sarah Adler, www.sfgate.com. May 27, 2012.

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• We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Evolution, Scientist, Social

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• The more elaborate your narrative, the more the spectator shuts up and listens obediently. And if the filmmaker keeps quiet, the spectator will himself project his own assumptions and sentiments onto the screen.

  Bruno Dumont

  Quiet, Assumption, Shut Up

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• Word, image, and sound all must have primacy in the development of the narrative.

  Fred Ritchin

  Sound, Development, Primacy

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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