#Narrative Quotes

“History is written by the victors.”

“Our best history is still poetry.”

“What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on.”

“History is the lie commonly agreed upon.”

“All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon”

“History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.”

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.”

“I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?”

“If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.”

“I wish, when I was first born, the first thing I said was "Quote" so the last thing I said before I died would be "Unquote.”

“In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.”

“Any work of art must first of all tell a story.”

“This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.”

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”

“Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands...a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe of ¾ of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path that it traversed an hour before; but always going and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.”

“If a spectacle is going to be particularly imposing I prefer to see it through somebody else's eyes, because that man will always exaggerate. Then I can exaggerate his exaggeration, and my account of the thing will be the most impressive.”

“Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”

“In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.”

“Being able to tell one from start to finish, and making that puzzle come together at the end. That's the art for me.”

“Every story you tell is your own story.”

“Everything starts with a story.”

“Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.”

“Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.”

“There cannot be any 'story' without a fall - all stories are ultimately about the fall - at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.”

“In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.”

“Everything's a story - You are a story -I am a story.”

“Oh,Sara. It is like a story." "It is a story...everything is a story. You are a story-I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.”

“Marley was dead: to begin with.”

“Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.”

“And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.”

“Don't let them tell us stories.”