Top 100 Narratives Quotes

Pleas for white acceptance of black humanity have a long and terrible history in America, stretching back to the first slave narratives.

Usually superheroes with all their powers and action-driven narratives are supposed to appeal to boys and men more than women; and as an extension of that, it is a given that the creators of these characters are primarily men.

People always want narratives to be clean and easy.

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

Epic stories, especially ‘quest narratives’ like ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey,’ are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

Television is ever more ambitious, more akin to the Victorian novel with multiple narratives and more discursive material.

If you construct political narratives around the psychodramas of politicians, even when they don’t invite it, you open the way for those who can play this game more effectively.

‘Pierrot le Fou’ is something I keep coming back to. It’s so surreal but still really engaging – it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.

For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors – which is the logic of narratives in general – over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.

I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works – which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.

My shows are not narratives.

If you do a sketch, that’s a very short narrative. Stand-up, it’s bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.

Every great narrative is at least two narratives, if not more – the thing that is on the surface and then the things underneath which are invisible.

The film industry is driven by male narrative. Heads of studios are often men, teeming with male executives everywhere you look, and so the narratives we have the screenwriters usually for male leads. Women tend to be second string: the girlfriend of, the secretary who becomes.

I don’t see a lot of narratives written where a woman who looks like me gets to be beautiful and sexualized and upwardly mobile, middle-class, funny, quirky. They’re very seldom written.

We go through life owned by the stories we tell ourselves which are often historic and charged narratives – things we’ve learnt since childhood that we don’t even consciously realise are going on.

A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.

I’m one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I’ve been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola.

Fashion has always captivated me because, like I said, it has the potential to create narratives about what’s beautiful, aspirational, chic, masculine, feminine, glamorous, etc. Generally, this power is dispatched in useless ways.

The narratives in which you’re born have a fierce pattern of repetition.

Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They’re devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.

When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.

Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, ‘Who’s choreographing this stuff?’

In everything I’ve written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don’t have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it’s a way of getting a plot moving.

My first album, ‘Englaborn,’ was based on music originally written for the theatre. My solo albums, like ‘IBM 1401, a User’s Manual’ and ‘Fordlandia,’ have also had narratives attached to them.

I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.

These days we’re all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out – people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that – and I think we can do more interesting narratives.

We’ve gotten to a point where it costs so much money to make a movie that directors and filmmakers feel they have to make sure that everybody gets it. And that’s an unfortunate development, I think, in a lot of narratives floating around in the film industry.

That slave narratives existed at all implied a satisfactory conclusion to the journey – the attainment of literacy, the escape to the place where one could reflect on the experience of bondage and the flight to freedom, and, in the early days of the slave trade, the conversion to Christianity.

Shakespeare is so fundamental to the way we see story. A tremendous amount of narratives come from him – more than many authors are aware, I think.

Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I’m always looking beyond the surface. I’ve done that ever since I first picked up a camera.

Many Americans are eagerly watching the devolution of traditional news with relish because they agree with the prevailing narratives, whether based on true facts or imagined fiction.

There are two distinctly, almost surreally different narratives in Israel and Palestine… and to a great extent, both are right and both are wrong. Both peoples have suffered greatly and both have legitimate grievances against the other.

Blog culture has a hard time digesting narratives, but it has an easy time digesting ‘big ideas’ pieces.

I’ve always been interested in war, but especially its effects on society, which means bringing in the voices of women, which aren’t heard as much in the grand narratives.

The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can’t focus on longer narratives now – even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it’s an adventure film.

Digression is my passion. I’m not kidding. I love telling the main stories, but in some ways, what I love most is using those narratives as a way of stringing together the interesting stories that people have kind of forgotten and that are kind of surprising.

A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots.

There’s a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-called ‘funny animal scrolls’ were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.

Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven’t had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves, but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional.

A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions.

Rubio and Cruz bring with them only in America personal stories that rival the ‘log cabin’ narratives of presidential candidates the 19th Century. They are Hispanic-American children of immigrants.

I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds.

The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.

The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.

I just want different narratives for people of color, especially women of color. I just want something that’s different. I don’t want us to be put in a box. I want it to be kind of a redefinition of who were are. If I can even achieve that in a tiny way, I’ll be good. I’ll be good.

The sheer number of legendary narratives and historically verifiable incidents invites us to revise assumptions about the origins of biological and chemical warfare and its moral and technological constraints.

Britain First is an extremist organisation which seeks to divide communities through their use of hateful narratives which spread lies and stoke tensions.

What I appreciate about Radiohead’s work – and it’s most evident in ‘Hail to the Thief’ – is how the juxtaposition of narratives on the band’s albums somehow creates a sense of wholeness.