There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time...

I write short, my words tight to the thread of the narrative.

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops...

«Non tutte le parole sono precipitate al suolo» disse Lucio, trovando infine il coraggio di guardarmi negli occhi.Mi sforzai di dire qualcosa. «No?»«No» continuò, il volto ammorbidito. Era sollevato che avessi deciso di aprire bocca....

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death. . .. . . (quoting an obituary) ‘There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever...

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

We want our children to know and believe the one good story. Every other story is a copy or shadow of this one. Some copies of it are quite good and shout the Truth. Others...

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

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 ability to see our lives as stories and share those stories with others is at the core of what it means to be human. We use stories to order and make sense of our...

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.

There’s always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it’s with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it’s one you only narrate to yourself years after the...

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

Or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

Stories matter.

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

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

People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even...

The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences...

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and...

I hear music as narrative.

Yeah, episodic doesn’t work. Your coolest character needs something big and meaningful to do. Otherwise, well, it’s just narrative shit.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.

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.

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.

It’s my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I’ve written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don’t...

During the second half of the twentieth century, cross-fertilization among the disciplines of history, literature, sociology, and psychology led to scholarly awareness that historical accounts are not direct representations of actual events; they are, instead,...

I think that rap is narrative, when it’s done right.

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

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this...

I’m Godless. I’ve had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking.

Because I write fiction, I don’t write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as ‘I’ – you...

false convictions” by defense lawyers and political activists deserve far greater scrutiny from the media and the public.journal: Cheit, Ross E. “The Legend of Robert Halsey.” Journal of child sexual abuse 9.3-4 (2002): 37-52.

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

You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you...

Never miss an opportunity to be truly and deeply humiliated! The shame will carve you down to an individual of exquisite layering, and in the process, etch within you the arcs of exceptional narrative.

By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth,...

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

The stars are brilliant at this time of night and I wander these streets like a ritual I don’t dare to break for darling, the times are quite glorious.I left him by the water’s edge,still...

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

witch hunters,” as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate...

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...

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...

It is safe to assume that any individual or group you wish to influence has access to more wisdom than they currently use. It is also safe to assume that they also have considerably more...

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

If I’ve vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence,...