#narrative

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences. ↗

— Terry Tempest Williams

#disappearance #intelligence #language #narrative #beauty

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step. ↗

— Harry Mathews

#been #case #could #create #every

I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative. ↗

— Nicholas Mosley

#did #except #form #i #knew

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. ↗

— Stan Sakai

#companions #first #folk #funny #heroes

People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#ancestral #another #find #form #however

I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock." — Michelle Tea, "Paris: A Lie" from the anthology Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache ↗

— Clint Catalyst and MIchelle Tea

#anthology #clint-catalyst #editors #experimental #first-person-narrative

Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others--as well as to ourselves--the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world. (p. 333) ↗

— Daniel J. Siegel

#memory #narratives #neuropsychology #stories #unconscious

Human stories are practically always about one thing, really, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death. . . . . . (quoting an obituary) 'There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that ever happens to man is natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men must die, but for every man his death is an accident, and even if he knows it he would sense to it an unjustifiable violation.' Well, you may agree with the words or not, but those are the key spring of The Lord Of The Rings ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#j-r-r-tolkien #life-and-death #life-story #lord-of-the-rings #lotr

...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively. ↗

— Javier Marías

#existential #narrative #writing #death

It doesn't matter whether a sequence of words is called a history or a story: that is, whether it is intended to follow a sequence of actual events or not. As far as its verbal shape is concerned, it will be equally mythical in either case. But we notice that any emphasis on shape or structure or pattern or form always throws a verbal narrative in the direction we call mythical rather than historical.(p.21) ↗

— Northrop Frye

#literary-theory #narrative-theory #world-culture #equality