Narrative Quotes

The Princess BrideS. Morgenstern'sClassic Tale of True Loveand High AdventureYou 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.

Scared of words? I don't see why anybody ought to fear words. Words are tools

Henry Luce to his Time magazine writers: "Tell the history of our time through the people who make it.

Stories were heirlooms in these parts.

Lewis wanted us to understand that the inner world is shaped by stories.

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

We need to know not only what is done but what is purposed and said by those who shape the destines of states and realms." Horace Greeley

The press-savy Lincoln looked not to the future, but to the past.

Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.

Parables release the adrenaline of urgency into our bloodstream.

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.

The old law of an eye for an eye didn’t make them blind to the fact that another man’s terrorist wasn’t their freedom fighter.

I am not an atheist preacher. I am not an absolutist or chauvinist whose ways are immune to evolution. My core philosophy is that I might be wrong.

The most powerful words in English are, "Tell me a story.

We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment—narrative catechisms.

Jesus was not a theologian. He was God who told stories.

When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy!

Writing about the self to spur intellectual growth or attain a teardrop of emotional salvation is akin to a fish attempting to construct a net that will capture itself.

Story should be a descent -- the feeling that there is an intense gravity to the narrative that draws you down, down, down.

Healing stories are magickal tales born from personal tribulation and victory, which are then shared.

Enough anecdotes make a pattern.

Anecdotes came with his DNA.

Everyone listened to this amusing narrative with great interest, and the moment that Behemoth concluded it, they all shouted in unison: 'Lies!

I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.

If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.

Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.

Every story needs some sort of secret that impels it forward. Otherwise why would the reader bother to keep on turning the pages?

What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.

The Bible provocatively evokes desire.

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It's just too bad.

And it's just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there's no overlap.

If thinking wants to think God, then it must endeavor to tell stories.

From one end to the other I have identified with various forms of spirituality. I was a Jew, then a God-hater. I was an atheist, then a Christian, for which I was called a traitor.

Christianity tells a big story. It allows us to see our own story in a new way.

The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension.

Without stories we end up with stereotypes -- a flat earth with flat cardboard figures that have no texture or depth, no INTERIOR.

Berg was proud of his storytelling to the point where he collected stories about telling stories.

I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock."— Michelle Tea, "Paris: A

Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their vo

Discipline is aimed at formation for a specific end, and that end is determined by our founding narrative.

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.

I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.