Quotes about Narrative

This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and it's object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science.

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Generally speaking, all the great events have been distorted, most of the important causes concealed, some of the principal characters never appear, and all who figure are so misunderstood and misrepresented, that the result is a complete mystification, and the perusal of the narrative about as profitable as reading the Republic of Plato or the Utopia if More.

Why do we always have to see black people in hindsight? Why are the Hollywood movies always historical? What about the contemporary image of black people?

Throughout the biblical narrative what sets humans apart from all animals is that humans alone possess a soul and therefore live eternally, reason, have moral capabilities, and can love. Unlike humans, nowhere are animals offered eternal life (John 3:15), commanded to think (Luke 10:27), held morally accountable (Ezek. 33:18—19), or commanded to love (John 15:17).

A lot of Christians have been taught a story that begins in chapter 3 of Genesis, instead of chapter 1. If your story doesn't begin in the beginning, but begins in chapter 3, then it starts with sin, and so the story becomes about dealing with the sin problem. So Jesus is seen as primarily dealing with our sins.

And did she talk to him after that as usual? asked Sara Ray. Oh, yes, she was just the same as she used to be, said the Story Girl wearily. But that doesn't belong to the story. It stops when she spoke at last. You're never satisfied to leave a story where it should stop, Sara Ray.

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance, - you might as well take the book along with them

One story is good, till another is told.

The best stories are often true...The narrative of human life is most beautiful when told truthfully and without boundaries.