Quotes about Narrative

If we are to use the Bible effectively, then we must use it the way God wrote it — in narrative form. Our team rejects the notion that the Bible is simply an encyclopedia of disconnected Bible verses. God's Word is less like a cookbook and more like a novel.

Augustine, the most famous convert of antiquity, was puzzled that he could have held so firmly to so many different falsehoods; he was not astounded that there are so many different truths. His conversion was not from explanation to narrative, but from one explanation to another. When he crossed the line from paganism to Christianity, he arrived in the territory of a truth beyond further challenge.

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.

Infinite speakers are Plato's poietai taking their place in the historical. Storytellers enter the historical not when their speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives. The stories they tell touch us. What we thought was an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly takes the dramatic shape of unresolved narrative.

Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.

All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.

If you tell a story that's only allegory, then it doesn't help you at all. If it doesn't bring some emotional charge, then it's just talking about something.

Women know things that men will never know. We keep the best secrets. We tell the best stories.

An old Apache storyteller reminds us

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

God must love art because most of the Bible is expressed in the form of story or poetry.

What I may intend for a story to communicate and what a story ends up communicating could be two different things. And it could be an even more positive thing.