Narratives are the primary way in which we make sense of our lives, as opposed to, for example schema,cognition, beliefs, constructs. Definition of narrative include the important element of giving meaning to events and experiences over time by connecting them as a developing, continuing story. - Jacqui Stedmon
The light is amber, the air still; the daylilies have folded in on themselves. Soon, the hooded blue of dusk will fall, followed by the darkness of night and the sky writing of the stars, indecipherable to us mortals, despite our attempts to force narrative upon them. - Elizabeth Berg
Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead. - Jeanette Winterson
Tough topics are only tough for those who don't want to approach conversation, who don't like problematizing the status quo and nuancing the narrative. - Monica O Montgomery
Most information doesn’t constitute a story. Think of a telephone directory: lots of information, strong cast, but a bit weak on narrative. What counts in a story is its meaning. And that’s a very different concept from information. - Ian Stewart
I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme. - Darren Aronofsky
I wanted to know the denouement of your life story. I have no interest in the narrative. - Debasish Mridha
Focus on the denouement of the purpose of life and act on the narrative. - Debasish Mridha
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material. - William Zinsser
Narrative understanding is a large part of the ability to connect with, understand, and have compassion for all of us engaged in learning more about being human. - Leah C. Fowler
Narrative secrets are not the same as human mysteries, a lesson that novelists seem fates to forget, again and again; the former quickly confess themselves, and fall silent, while the true mysteries go on speaking. - James Wood
Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending on their childhood. - David Brooks
Even a poor translator couldn't kill a style that moves with such narrative clarity. - William Zinsser
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. - Joan Didion
Yeah, episodic doesn't work. Your coolest character needs something big and meaningful to do. Otherwise, well, it's just narrative shit. - Don Roff
Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion. - Carol Ann Duffy
We must rip the foundations out from under all the bastions of human reasoning that say, "I don't need God!" We must demolish every non-God story of life. We must pulverize every God-is-not-good life narrative. - James MacDonald
I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters. - Lydia Davis
Bill Bryson's is a synthesizing intellect, capable of translating myriad data into a digestible narrative – rare currency in an increasingly atomized society. - Allen Guy Wilcox
the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools...It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction. - Meghan O'Rourke
I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment. - Elmore Leonard
The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration. - Adam Johnson
If you don't have a narrative, just make one up. You can always change it when you have more clarity. Any narrative beats no narrative." - L. R. W. Lee - L.R.W. Lee
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. - Joan Didion
Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. - W. S. Gilbert
We all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero. - Daniel Kahneman
I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autobiographical memory. - Oliver Sacks
To change someone's mind, requires only that you speak a more compelling narrative about their situation than their current one. - L.R.W. Lee
Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore. - Edith Wharton
I’m not beholden to the confirmation of your prejudices; to be perfectly frank, the prospect of confining the female characters in my story to placid, helpless secondary places in the narrative is so goddamn boring that I would rather not write at all. - Scott Lynch
Somebody once asked me if I have anything like faith, and I said I have faith in the narrative. I have a belief in a narrative that is bigger than me, that is alive and I trust will work itself out. - Joss Whedon
I bleed words.I dream in narrative. I live in infinite worlds.I befriend figmental characters.I wish on stars in other galaxies.I harvest stories from a brooding muse.I bloom under moonlight in hushed seclusion.I am a writer. - Richelle E. Goodrich
The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. - Jeanette Winterson
When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. - Nicholas Kristof
Fear of being wrong paralyzes people. Get over it! If you're wrong, invent a new narrative and move on." - L. R. W. Lee - L.R.W. Lee
Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It’s not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence - Martin Amis
Torah is not merely a collection of prohibitions, rigid strictures and boring observances. Rather, it is a narrative of the blessings and promises of God initially offered to one person and family, but through which the whole world will ultimately be blessed. - Walter C. Kaiser Jr.
You control whether you are happy. It's all your narrative and you can change it if you choose to." - L. R. W. Lee Andy Smithson: Blast of the Dragon's Fury - L.R.W. Lee
I said once that lies have no rights against truth. I was wrong. In daily life, it's the truth that's disenfranchised. What fits the popular narrative, what makes an observer happy with the consistency of events, is what is believed. - Adrian Lamo
Story should be a descent -- the feeling that there is an intense gravity to the narrative that draws you down, down, down. - Chuck Wendig
The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction. - Sara Sheridan
As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be? - Stephen King
Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding. - Kate Millett