Quotes about Narrative

The Bible is the great family chronicle of the Jews.

It has been somewhere said by Johnson, that merely to invent a story is no small effort of the human understanding.

Whoever tells the best story wins.

The story God is writing through your life is someone else's subplot. It was true for David's mighty men. It's true for me. And it's true for you.

In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has.

The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Scripture trains us to listen to and learn from stories of all kinds, inside the sacred text and outside, and to discern patterns and meanings within them. Stories of all sorts form and shape the character of those who read them. We live within the narrative as creatures in search of an ending, in search of happiness.

The author extols the power of having significant portions of God's Word read in public worship with the following analogy. He says that by reading a few short verses, we are like someone glimpsing nature through window from across the room. But by taking in more lengthy passages of Scripture, we are like someone who, intrigue, gets right next to the window to take in more of the view that it offers, basking in more of the arc of the whole the whole narrative.

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life—for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

The Bible is the story so far in the true novel that God is still writing.

The meaning of the story is found in every detail, as well as in the broad narrative. The pain and tears of all the years were met together on Calvary. The sorrow of heaven joined with the anguish of earth; the forgiving love stored up in God's future was poured out into the present; the voices that echo in a million human hearts, crying for justice, longing for spirituality, eager for relationship, yearning for beauty, drew themselves together into a final scream of desolation.