Narrative Quotes - page 2

It's an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you've been and whats happened. In the end, you're just happy you were there - with your eyes open - and lived to see it. (Anthony Bourdain)
Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else. View quote
Peter Greenaway
Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress. View quote
Anton Chekhov
Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why. View quote
Lloyd deMause
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I was a narrative historian, believing more and more as I matured that the first function of the historian was to answer the child's question, "What happened next?" View quote
A. J. P. Taylor
[Director Christopher] Nolan has not only crafted the best Batman movie, but arguably the second-best motion picture superhero narrative (topped only by the linked duo of Superman and Superman II). For those who thought Spider-Man and X-Men had a lot to offer, wait till you see where this film goes. Batman Begins is a strong re-start to a franchise that deserves better than it has often been accorded. View quote
James Berardinelli
Seventeen years after its intial release, The Empire Strikes Back is still as thrilling and involving as ever. Because of the high quality of the original product, it doesn't show a hint of dating. Neither [Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope nor Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi] were able to match the narrative scope of Empire, which today remains one of the finest and most rousing science fiction tales ever committed to the screen. View quote
James Berardinelli
The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play. View quote
Patrick Marber
...a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it... View quote
Randall Jarrell
The Singing of Swans is a remarkable narrative calling--even compelling--us to connect with our own ancestral roots, to seek our own inner wisdom, and to reclaim our own inner voices! (Margaret Starbird)
Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story. View quote
Penelope Lively
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. View quote
Peter Straub
Well, if storytelling is important, then your narrative ability, or your ability to put into words or use what someone else has put into words effectively, is important too. View quote
Howard Gardner
One's teachers all belonged to that generation who were imperialists, and the whole narrative throughout my adolescence was of countries leaving the empire. I find it extraordinary that this purpose which drove how we viewed the world is now considered to be something that has no effect upon us. View quote
Jeremy Paxman
Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards. View quote
Jessica Stern
In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures. View quote
Douglas Rushkoff
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. View quote
Eugenio Montale
It's actually not very hard to re-set between the adult novels and the ones for younger readers. The narrative voices are very similar, the smartass attitude, the environmental battles. Kids love books that are irreverent and challenge authority, when authority is arbitrary, greedy or foolish. They also love it when you make fun of grownups, and I've spent my whole life as a writer doing that. View quote
Carl Hiaasen
Like an explorer returned from a distant planet or another dimension, Suki Kim has many extraordinary tales to tell, among them how different--and how awful--life is for those who live in North Korea. The devil is in the details here, for her gritty narrative focuses on everyday events to reveal how repression shapes daily life, even for the most privileged. Yet Kim also bears witness to that part of the human soul that no oppressor can ever claim. View quote
Carlos Eire
Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands. (Alan Rickman)
I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen. View quote
Laura Hillenbrand
My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them. View quote
Lydia Davis
I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking. View quote
Darren Aronofsky
The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to. View quote
Robert Creeley