#narrative

My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible. ↗

— George Armstrong Custer

#narrative #possible #purpose #truthful

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

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

...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

I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives. ↗

— Rachel Weisz

#i #major #narratives #stories

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about. ↗

— Stephen Greenblatt

#also #believe #broken #care #complicated

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread. ↗

— Paul Auster

#day #follow #lose #narrative #next

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. ↗

— E. L. Doctorow

#fiction #longer #narrative #nonfiction #only

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them. ↗

— John Drinkwater

#distinct #drama #energy #epic #experiences