Quotes about Narrative

These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.

These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device - a means of summing up and making a knot of innumerable little threads. Innumerable threads were there; still, if I stopped to disentangle, I could collect a number. But whatever the reason may be, I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the past.

But if there are no stories, what end can there be, or what beginning?

Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions.

Now there is nothing in this world I abominate worse, than to be interrupted in a story...

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To

It is remarkable that what we call the world, which is so very credulous in what professes to be true, is most incredulous in what professes to be imaginary; and that, while, every day in real life, it will allow in one man no blemishes, and in another no virtues, it will seldom admit a very strongly-marked character, either good or bad, in a fictitious narrative, to be within the limits of probability.

First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai.

In a letter of Lafayette to Washington ("Paris, 12 Jan., 1790") he writes: "Common Sense is writing for you a brochure where you will see a part of my adventures." It thus appears that the narrative embodied in the reply to Burke ("Rights of Man," Part I.), dedicated to Washington, was begun with Lafayette's collaboration fourteen months before its publication (March 13, 1791).

Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.

Where all is known, no narrative is possible.

Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.