Ali Smith
Author
"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."
Narrative quotes
Narrative
346 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Kiki Smith
Artist
"One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Author, Statistician
"You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative."
Bruce Springsteen
Musician, Singer-songwriter
"I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition."
Ava DuVernay
Film Director
"I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians."
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Topics related to Narrative
Browse quotes that often appear alongside narrative — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Narrative quotes (page 1 of 18)
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"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE"
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"Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy."
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"By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!"
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"To me, it's just that social media is allowing people to be in charge of their own narratives."
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"Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors."
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"Meaning arises from loving life, not from goals or narratives."
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"The young today cannot follow narrative but they are alert to drama. They cannot bear description but they love landscape and action."
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"Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created."
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"I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous."
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"I don't consider myself to be a crusader of any sort. I was bystander to a certain number of newspaper crusades. They end badly, in terms of being either fraudulent or by inspiring legislations that makes things worse. So, I regard myself as someone coming to the campfire with the truest possible narrative he can acquire."
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"In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out."
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"Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid."
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"Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems."
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"The lyric self is the self; the narrative self is not."
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"We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images."
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"The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create."
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"Well, if storytelling is important, then your narrative ability, or your ability to put into words or use what someone else has put into words effectively, is important too."
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"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 towards the watcher on the shore."
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"Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative."
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"This unceasing interplay between experience and narrative is a uniquely human attribute. We are the storytellers, the ones who put life into words."
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