Narratives quotes:

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Narratives have the same power, I think. Some readers of my novels ask me, "Why do you understand me?". That's a huge pleasure of mine because it means that readers and I can make our narratives relative. -- Haruki Murakami
Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it requires something to put a handsome face on a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offenses, particularly of blood and wounds..." -- Leigh Hunt
Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy. -- Antonio Damasio
Narratives are the primary way in which we make sense of our lives, as opposed to, for example schema,cognition, beliefs, constructs. Definition of narrative include the important element of giving meaning to events and experiences over time by connecting them as a developing, continuing story. -- Jacqui Stedmon
Narratives are the primary way in which we make sense of our lives, as opposed to, for example schema,cognition, beliefs, constructs. Definition of narrative include the important element of giving meaning to events and experiences over time by connecting them as a developing, continuing story." -- Jacqui Stedmon
Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives. -- David Antin
The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity. -- Hans Urs von Balthasar
Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts. -- Caroline Knapp
Somebody must be up and somebody must be down. Trouble is, campaigns are messy, subtle creatures that don't follow convenient narratives. -- Ron Fournier
The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold. -- Mary Karr
Most people aren't familiar enough with what actually goes on in professional wrestling to know just how badly women are treated in WWE narratives. -- Jackson Katz
In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out. -- Ava DuVernay
Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, 'Who's choreographing this stuff?' -- Sue Monk Kidd
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I'm one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I've been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola. -- Junot Diaz
Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera. -- David LaChapelle
Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories. -- Paul Auster
A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions. -- Serge Schmemann
The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology. -- Paul Davies
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration. -- Richard Schickel
In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It's hard to shake those sort of narratives. -- Ben Affleck
North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives - or risk having their narratives shaped by others. -- Evgeny Morozov
The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that. -- George Will
I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about. -- Stephen Greenblatt
The religious imagery and fairytales that formed our shared cultural references have been replaced by the cult of celebrity. Marilyn is the sex goddess, Camilla Parker Bowles is cast as the wicked witch, Che Guevara is the revolutionary. Celebrities have become visual shorthand for narratives that shape our lives. -- Alison Jackson
New platforms are emerging: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Xbox. And film actors are gravitating towards television, because there are basically better roles there. Television is making the kind of epics and genres that the movie studios used to make, and often doing it better with more complex narratives and corresponding budgets. -- David S. Goyer
Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. -- Robin Marantz Henig
It's seldom that you find great moments in television. Usually you remember - in 'Breaking Bad' or any of these other great shows - you remember situations or characters. Not moments. But I have to say, I can make the same argument for mainstream movies, which have bad narratives and also no memorable moments. -- Alfonso Cuaron
While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding. -- Geraldine Brooks
Propelled by freedom of faith, gender equality and economic justice for all, India will become a modern nation. Minor blemishes cannot cloak the fact that India is becoming such a modern nation: no faith is in danger in our country, and the continuing commitment to gender equality is one of the great narratives of our times. -- Pranab Mukherjee
I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well. -- Peter Guber
I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people." -- Danai Gurira
I think we have become oversaturated with tired fictional narratives." -- Lucy Walker
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives." -- Jean François Lyotard
One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives." -- Kiki Smith
I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds." -- Michael Cunningham
A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots." -- Rupert Holmes
The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity." -- Hans Urs von Balthasar
...empathy is the driving force behind the experience of emotions in narratives (Keen, 2006; Mar et al., 2006; Oatley, 2011)." -- Mikkel Wallentin
Blog culture has a hard time digesting narratives, but it has an easy time digesting 'big ideas' pieces." -- Hanna Rosin
Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts." -- Caroline Knapp
Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors." -- Joseph Campbell
Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century." -- Stewart Brand
Somebody must be up and somebody must be down. Trouble is, campaigns are messy, subtle creatures that don't follow convenient narratives." -- Ron Fournier
I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians." -- Ava DuVernay
If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems?" -- Ethan Zuckerman
A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods." -- Matthew Tobin Anderson
Most people aren't familiar enough with what actually goes on in professional wrestling to know just how badly women are treated in WWE narratives." -- Jackson Katz
My sister-in-law believes that few narratives are so tightly constructed that you can't skip boring bits and still keep abreast of what's going on." -- Arthur Smith
...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies." -- Rebecca Makkai
I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space." -- Jonathan Lethem
God' - as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to." -- Johann Most
Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'" -- Sue Monk Kidd
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I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction." -- Jonathan Lethem
Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera." -- David LaChapelle
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life." -- David Whyte
A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions." -- Serge Schmemann
There's a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called 'funny animal scrolls' were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions." -- Stan Sakai
Lyotard has described the postmodern condition succinctly as "incredulity towards metanarratives":' an attitude commendable in itself, no doubt, but also one that can easily be translated into a dogmatic metanarrative of its own. In" -- David Bentley Hart
We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful." -- Orhan Pamuk
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration." -- Richard Schickel
The process of dehuminazing the locals was under way, and it had very little to do with veracity. The Puritan narratives would continue that process and bring the devil into the mix. At least John Smith didn't think Satan was involved." -- Thomas C. Foster
In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving." -- Peter Temple
As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163" -- Michelle Richmond
Conflict is the microscope of a book. When it's trained on a character, you see what's underneath the narratives of physical description. You see whether someone is strong or weak, principled or apathetic, heroic or villainous."(J.R. on writing the BDB series)" -- J.R. Ward
Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs--what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?" -- Thomas Pynchon
Storytellers continue their narratives late into the night to forestall death and to delay the inevitable moment when everyone must fall silent. Scheherazade's story is a desperate inversion of murder; it is the effort, throughout all those nights, to exclude death from the circle of existence." -- Michel Foucault
How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks." -- Benjamin Zander
They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out." -- Salman Rushdie
Fresh from the rarefied environments of Harvard, the author says he purposefully took journalism jobs in small southern towns so that he could learn the art of conversation with ordinary people. Is this gift for listening and for conversation, it seems, that allowed him to produce textured historical narratives of grand impact." -- David Halberstam
Propelled by freedom of faith, gender equality and economic justice for all, India will become a modern nation. Minor blemishes cannot cloak the fact that India is becoming such a modern nation: no faith is in danger in our country, and the continuing commitment to gender equality is one of the great narratives of our times." -- Pranab Mukherjee
...a fundamental rule of journalism, which is to tell a story and stick to it. The narratives of journalism (significantly called "stories"), like those of mythology and folklore, derive their power from their firm, undeviating sympathies and antipathies. Cinderella must remain good and the stepsisters badSecond stepsister not so bad after all" is not a good story." -- Janet Malcolm
Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, mental maps, ideas, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we inspire and motivate human beings. Great stories help us to understand our place in the world, create our identity, discover our purpose, form our character and define and teach human values." -- Jeroninio Almeida
So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe." -- Tim Wise
I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters." -- Joe Hill
I think any new technology that helps connect and create social cohesion is great. But at the end of the day, you and I are analog creatures. We have to take 'oohs and aahs' and convert them to 0s and 1s and then convert them back to 'oohs and aahs.' Narratives that work in social networks are the exchange of stories that are told well." -- Peter Guber
My shows are not narratives. -- Brian Eno
A trial is two narratives competing for your attention. -- Harlan Coben
Meaning arises from loving life, not from goals or narratives. -- Julio Olalla
I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people. -- Danai Gurira
People are interested in examining the way we consume narratives. -- Rod Blackhurst
Ignore the trade-pub narratives about how little success indies enjoy. -- Nathan Lowell
Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely. -- Ted Hughes
One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives. -- Kiki Smith
I'm pretty much good at heroic narratives and making people laugh. -- Joss Whedon
The bone-breaking thing is something that I put in many narratives. -- Guy Maddin
I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives. -- Rachel Weisz
I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds. -- Michael Cunningham
Within neoliberal narratives, the message is clear: Buy/ sell/ or be punished. -- Henry Giroux
Nostalgia keeps dissolving the ironic narratives in which I have contained my past. -- Mason Cooley
Art in the United States is a kind of visual entertainment focusing on expected narratives. -- Massimiliano Gioni
I think that through the narratives of other people you get closer to your own. -- Chath Piersath
Adults need more complex narratives. They have their own narratives. The main characters are themselves. -- Haruki Murakami
I do use art as a site of protest, particularly in relation to dominant narratives. -- Vivek Shraya
Writing a children's book means you cannot spin out long narratives or have complex character development. -- Norman Macleod
A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots. -- Rupert Holmes
I started a production company out of necessity, the need for great narratives for actors of color. -- Viola Davis
If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives. -- Kate Zambreno
By all means, avoid words"?threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words! -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
...empathy is the driving force behind the experience of emotions in narratives (Keen, 2006; Mar et al., 2006; Oatley, 2011). -- Mikkel Wallentin
To me, it's just that social media is allowing people to be in charge of their own narratives. -- Jose Antonio Vargas
Blog culture has a hard time digesting narratives, but it has an easy time digesting 'big ideas' pieces. -- Hanna Rosin
Extremist perspectives win sympathy and recruits because they offer narratives that claim to identify deep injustices and enemies. -- Jonas Gahr Store
As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time. -- David Hare
We all love narratives where we're the captain of our boat, and Americans love them more than anybody else. -- Anne-Marie Slaughter
I'm fond of implied narratives, oblique angles, and leaving a little room for the viewer to finish a picture. -- Keith Carter
Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors. -- Joseph Campbell
Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique. -- Oliver Sacks
The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit. -- Tullian Tchividjian
Within neoliberal narratives, youth are mostly defined as a consumer market, a drain on the economy, or stand for trouble. -- Henry Giroux
All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood. -- Lucy Grealy
I like the idea of building this wandering, epic narrative in a form that people don't expect epic narratives to appear. -- Lucas Neff
Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories. -- Mark Twain
A society that's addicted to narratives with beginnings, middles, and endings will eventually yearn to end. We just want it to end. -- Douglas Rushkoff
I love creating individual short stories within chapters, but I want to get better at building consistent narratives from start to finish. -- David Crabb
Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we're comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person's experience to a sound bite. -- Phil Klay
If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? -- Ethan Zuckerman
I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history. -- Jonathan Coe
My role in the government was not to think about narratives and consistency with narratives, but think of the human consequences of rules. -- Cass Sunstein

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