Narrative Quotes - page 9
George Orwells 1984 frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: its not a celebration of poetic language. Its decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what 1984 shows is that language can be a dirty trick.
Graham Joyce
Ideology is a parasite on religious substructures. A religious narrative has a particular set of characteristics. It's very balanced. So for example there's the feminist idea of the patriarchy. Well the religious idea of society has a patriarchal notion built into it. That would be the dying king. The once great dying king. In a religious story, there's the natural world, the chaotic world - there's a positive element and a negative element. Then there's the social world - there's the wise king and the tyrannical king. Then there's the individual world - that's the adversary and the hero. There's always a positive and a negative at each level. And it stops it from being an over simplification.
Jordan Peterson
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
Douglas Rushkoff
Nonfiction is both easier and harder to write than fiction. It's easier because the facts are already laid out before you, and there is already a narrative arc. What makes it harder is that you are not free to use your imagination and creativity to fill in any missing gaps within the story.
Amy Bloom
I've always been fascinated by dreams - they seem like such intriguing evidence of the brain's obsession with narrative as a form of sense-making. But because dreaming is an unconscious process, we have little control over the stories we tell, so they can be fraught with anxiety, vulnerability, and exposure.
Chloe Benjamin
We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don't usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I'm saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place.
Lydia Davis
It's the hardening of these narratives that makes peace so difficult. If each side can see the narrative, the claims that the other has, then there is a much more likely possibility of making a resolution. But what I see is the opposite. There is a total disclaiming of the validity of the other side, and talk that I find really unsettling, the kind of chatter you get from ultra-right Israelis and Hamas is of annihilation. In that kind of dialogue, there's no way to move toward peace.
Lawrence Wright
