"The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create."
Narrative quotes
Narrative
346 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside narrative — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Narrative quotes (page 2 of 18)
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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."
"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."
"Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative."
"This unceasing interplay between experience and narrative is a uniquely human attribute. We are the storytellers, the ones who put life into words."
"Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping."
"You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world."
"We allude to the short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour to one or two hours in its perusal"
"I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it."
"Music is such an integral part of a film and really drives the emotional narrative, it has to be integrated from the beginning."
"There is no single test or formula for producing moral progress anymore than there is for generating scientific truths. It is a process involving theoreticians, fact-gatherers, protestors, martyrs for the cause, authors of first- person narratives who change the way we see and evaluate the distribution of harms and benefits."
"Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content."
"My sister-in-law believes that few narratives are so tightly constructed that you can't skip boring bits and still keep abreast of what's going on."
"Certainly, my friends and the common narrative is people are trying to shore up their own lives with regards to family planning and reproduction."
"If so much of your experience is devoted to the thought of documentation, you're already sort of spinning out this narrative from this moment that you are attempting to control instead of just experiencing it."
"This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery."
"I sort of feel like that's the most revolutionary thing we can do with our narrative for me as Black people is to show that we are just like you."
"one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all."
"The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere."
"We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people."