140 Narrative Quotes
Following is our list of narrative quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about change the narrative.
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Famous Narrative Quotes
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. — E. L. Doctorow
The best stories are often true...The narrative of human life is most beautiful when told truthfully and without boundaries. — Shonda Rhimes
The narrative impulse is always with us; we couldn't imagine ourselves through a day without it. — Robert Coover
A story can take you through a whole process of searching, seeking, confronting, through conflicts, and then to a resolution. As the storyteller and the listener, we go through a story together. — Maxine Hong Kingston
Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. — Robert McKee
All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. . . . — Harvey Cox
We lay out our lives in a narrative we understand, like a movie, but are you enjoying making it or are you wondering who's watching my movie. — Donald Glover
Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories. — Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story. — Patrick Rothfuss
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. — Joan Didion
I do believe in the power of story. I believe that stories have an important role to play in the formation of human beings, that they can stimulate, amaze and inspire their listeners. — Hayao Miyazaki
Humans are, by nature, pattern-seeking, storytelling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns whether they exist or not. — Michael Shermer
Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form. — Jean Luc Godard
A story communicates fear, hope, and anxiety, and because we can feel it, we get the moral not just as a concept, but as a teaching of our hearts. That’s the power of story. — Marshall Ganz
Whoever tells the best story wins. — John Quincy Adams
Short Narrative Quotes
- The complexity of the world cannot be reduced down to simple narratives or binary thinking. — Bret Weinstein
- I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective. — Anthony Bourdain
- Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking. — Griffin Dunne
- The most effective way to defeat patriarchy is to defy and disown its self-legitimating narrative. — John Lamb Lash
- My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible. — George Armstrong Custer
- Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell. — Tom Fishburne
- Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Music is the subliminal connecting adhesive in film, or at least in narrative feature films. — Carter Burwell
- I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition. — Bruce Springsteen
- With narration, you have to be very accurate with your voice. It's a good exercise to do. — Ben Kingsley
Power Of Narrative Quotes
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
Collective freedom provides the basic conditions for people to narrate their own lives, hold power accountable, and embrace a capacious notion of human dignity. — Henry Giroux
Director Gary Ross has created an adaptation that is faithful in both narrative and theme, but he's also brought a rich and powerful vision of Panem, its brutality and excesses, to the film as well. His world building's fantastic, whether it be the Seam or the Capitol. — Suzanne Collins
A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook. — H. P. Lovecraft
The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative. — Jane Campion
The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other. — John William Draper
First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success. — Anne Rice
At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention. — Julia Bacha
The power of narrative sort of defines something forever and ever. — Rod Blackhurst
There's nothing more threatening than a powerful woman, and there's nothing more threatening to the current order of things than women powerfully owning their own narrative. It's so threatening to people, to women as well, and it's threatening the order of things. — Amanda Palmer
Change The Narrative Quotes
Movements have narratives. They tell stories, because they are not just about rearranging economics and politics. They also rearrange meaning. And they're not just about redistributing the goods. They're about figuring out what is good. — Marshall Ganz
Eggs were never unhealthy - we were just misled by bad science dressed up as fact. The truth didn’t change, but the narrative did. There's a lesson in that. — Max Lugavere
If the great story of the last century was the conflict among various political ideologies-communism, fascism and democracy-then the great narrative of this century will be the changes wrought by astonishing scientific breakthroughs — Cynthia Tucker
The narratives of Scripture were not meant to describe our world ... but to change the world, including the one in which we now live. — Stanley Hauerwas
Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can. — Chris Abani
Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative. — Aminatta Forna
One of the best ways to convince someone is to use a telling example, a story, a narrative. When Steve Jobs announced a new product, he told a story, exzlaining how a product would change the world as we know it. He turned Apple into a story whose challenges and adventures you want to hear about. — Kabir Sehgal
Change the narrative, change the laws. — Ani Difranco
Even within single sentences, there are sudden changes of register. And when the travellers go to Venice, they see a play by Voltaire! This is a novel [Candid] which has narratives within narratives, such as when Cunégonde recounts her story. — Mark Ravenhill
Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design. — H. P. Lovecraft
Personal Narrative Quotes
The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape. — Andrew Vachss
They trap you in the toxic narrative that quitting is a weakness, an easy way out or, worse yet, that quitting is failure. I assure you – quitting is for winners and quitting is a skill. — Steven Bartlett
I've worked out of a series of no's. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no's force me to the yes. I have a white background. I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us. — Richard Avedon
Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, "I knew girls who saved his gum." — Amy Hempel
'God' - as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to. — Johann Most
The charade of politics is to make voters think that the personal narrative of the candidate affects the operation of the corporate state. It doesn't really matter on the fundamental issues whether the President is Republican or Democratic. — Chris Hedges
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 — Mark Twain
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
In food, issues that surround purchasing and that whole realm have a very political component and they branch into stories that can be really compelling. Just being on the farm, interacting with all these people in the industry, leads to personal narratives that can be used to make a larger point. — Dan Barber
There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. — Douglas Adams
Narrative Voice Quotes
Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage, But wise through time, and narrative with age, In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice - A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice. — Alexander Pope
When I wrote The Virgin Suicides, I gave myself very strict rules about the narrative voice: the boys would only be able to report what they had seen or found or what had been told to them. — Jeffrey Eugenides
Although there was a screenplay, the actors never knew what questions I was going to ask them, and all of my character's voice-over narration and scenes were added after the fact. — Griffin Dunne
God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character. — Robert McKee
I was not aware of how much I loved 'Canoa' until I saw it after doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and realized that my voice - over about the story's historical context - that narrator - came from 'Canoa'. — Alfonso Cuaron
One objection I have heard voiced to works of this kinddealing with Texasis the amount of gore spilled across the pages. It can not be otherwise. In order to write a realistic and true history of any part of the Southwest, one must narrate such things, even at the risk of monotony. — Robert E. Howard
Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself. — James Lee Burke
I am voice actor Roger Craig Smith. You may know me as Batman, Captain America, Sonic the Hedgehog, Ezio from Assassin's Creed, Transformers: RID, or narrator of “Say Yes To the Dress” (among many other things). AMA! — Roger Craig Smith
Voice is one of the most elusive qualities in any story. We recognize it when we hear it, but it's hard consciously to create an authentic voice. Somehow voice seems to be the natural manifestation of all the narrative decisions we've made so far. We discover it more than we fabricate it. — Philip Gerard
I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets. — Diane Wakoski
Narrative Art Quotes
Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions. — Kiki Smith
Nearly everything that defines much of our daily experiences is consummatory in nature. Yes, we consume products and services. But we also consume life experiences, religious narratives, art, literature, and ideas. — Gad Saad
Art brings a message into a room. It should make us perceive in a new way - either through color, form or narrative content - something we had not perceived before... and perhaps reveal something to you about yourself. — Gloria Vanderbilt
In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact. — Jerry Saltz
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction. — Jonathan Lethem
I love telling stories. And even in single images, I tend to have stories inside them. I've always loved film, but I was making drawings and paintings and photographs. And you put art and narrative together, and that really is comics. — Dave McKean
Be it sculpture, poetry, or narrative fraught with terrible insight... art does endure. It troubles and pleases, inspires, and reminds us that humanity is ever capable of adding to the sum of the world's grave beauty. — Stephanie Mills
The best way to truly understand narrative art is to experience it. — George Lucas
A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did. — Martin Filler
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. — Eugenio Montale
Narrative Structure Quotes
One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures. — George Lakoff
Telling our stories is what saves us. The story is enough... The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy. — James Carroll
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to. — Don Delillo
To know how to structure the joke perfectly so that the narrative information is given in the right tempo, in just the right dose - it sometimes takes quite a lot of work. It seems easy when you hear the joke. — David Salle
Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story. — Penelope Lively
When you love a teacher very much - as I did Olivier Messiaen - you do have to leave them.One of the things that separated me from Messiaen was my desire to create works with a big structure, a large symphonic sweep. His forms are wonderful, glorious mosaics, but again, I prefer narrative. — George Benjamin
The F.B.I. was very happy with the article they produced, which was entitled, "The Black Merchants of Hate," that came out in early 1963. What's significant about that piece is that that became the template for what evolved into the basic narrative structure of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. — Manning Marable
I also like poems that are haunted by a structure or a narrative, or poems that frisk flirtatiously at the boundary of sense. — Matthea Harvey
I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names. — Louise Erdrich
As we begin to become aware of the narrative patterns around which we structure our lives, we learn how to take charge, revise, refine, and even completely rewrite them. — Mandy Aftel
First Person Narrative Quotes
First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work. — James McBride
Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature. — Manuel Puig
Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative. — Edward Gibbon
A first-person voice helps to ensure the uniformity and cohesiveness of the narrative; it gathers unto itself incidents and characters in its unstoppable progress toward the story's end. — Norman Lock
Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.' — Maya Angelou
The way that I see third person is it's actually first person. Writing for me is all voice work. Third person narrative is just as character-driven as first person narrative for me in terms of a voice. I don't write very much in third person. — Ottessa Moshfegh
I came to New York, and it was a really cool time. People like Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee were making their first movies, and they were making movies that were personal narratives. — Christine Vachon
It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader. — Akhil Sharma
I think first-person narrators should be complex, because otherwise the first-person is too shallow and predictable. I like a first-person narrator who can't totally be trusted. — Rick Moody
I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to unreliable. — Charles Palliser
People Writing About Narrative
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 E. L. Doctorow |
92 | 219 |
 Shonda Rhimes |
53 | 526 |
 Robert Coover |
10 | 73 |
 Maxine Hong Kingston |
57 | 218 |
 Robert McKee |
67 | 296 |
 Harvey Cox |
19 | 155 |
More Narrative Quotes
The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved. — Bryan Stevenson
Knowledge is not to be taken from four types of people: a foolish person who openly acts foolish, even if he reports the most narrations; an adherent of bid'ah who calls to his desires; a person who lies, even if I don't accuse him of lying in hadith; and a righteous pious worshiper who does not accurately retain what he narrates. — Malik ibn Anas
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
I think human beings have evolved to appreciate narrative, in the same way that we have evolved to learn language. What is narrative, after all, but a kind of super-language, where stories, like words, are ways of encapsulating information? — Alex Epstein
Multimedia is not more media, but the employment of various kinds of media (and hybrid media) for what they each offer to advance the narrative. — Fred Ritchin
There are three types of thought that our brains produce: insightful used for problem-solving, experiential focused on the task at hand, and narrative chatter. Those types are so distinctively different from each other that they occur in different parts of our brain. — Mo Gawdat
Bitcoin is eating the world. It has become a supermassive black hole that is sucking in everything around it and destroying it. This narrative is only going to grow over the next 18 months. — Raoul Pal
There has been a failure to grasp how competing narratives fight for the attention of angry young Muslims, and we have grossly underestimated the appeal of the jihadist brand. — Maajid Nawaz
Human tendency to conform, especially when in large groups, is terrifying. Propaganda machines leverage this throughout human history. The way out is to think freely, detached from the divisive narratives of the day that masquerade as universal truths. This often feels lonely. — Lex Fridman
Comedy is downstream of culture, so the job of comedy, in my opinion, is to always be responding to the things that are wrong with society in that moment. Most people say that the job of the comedian is to make people laugh, yes it is but is that all? I don’t think so. I think comedians should be saying: this is what the mainstream narrative is, and here are the holes in it. Comedians should be trying to take society forward, and they should be always pushing back against the mainstream because the mainstream is the authority. Whereas what’s happening now is that you have a culture where comedians are essentially buying into mainstream culture. They are the woke ones; they are the super-woke. Comedians are super-woke. I am massively hated by many people in the comedy world because I’m not. So I’ll have plenty to talk about – no problem there! — Konstantin Kisin
When serious people of good faith disagree, they've got to go back into the narratives and come at it again. One of the problems in the church is that people are not willing to do that. People have arrived at a place where they think they have got the answer. — Walter Brueggemann
It's not something that I, you know, any part of it I endorse one way or the other, but I do think that it ought to be permissible in this country to question official narratives. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
For me, it's always about using my platform to give people an alternative narrative because we all need to upgrade our mindsets. — Jay Shetty
Contrary to the narrative that the Earth is too hot and on the verge of burning, it's actually a place where far more people die of cold than of heat. And there's no way to keep 8 billion people warm without fossil fuels. — Alex Epstein
What, after all, is the narrative of the American Dream? It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era. — Naomi Wolf
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale. — Edgar Rice Burroughs
The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east — James A. Michener
By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes. — Caroline Knapp
The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up. — Chris Van Allsburg
National Standards was not a narrative of past events but was leftwing revisionism and Political Correctness. — Phyllis Schlafly
The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character. — Paul Ricoeur
In short, I have spent much of my career working on vaccine development. I have also had extensive experience in drug repurposing for infectious disease outbreaks. My contributions to science and industry are outstanding. I am proud of my contributions. My friendships and connections with professional colleagues have persisted for years. So, when I am defamed by the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, or others, I know that there is more driving their character assassination attempts than efforts to report actual truth. These attacks are not about me personally, but rather about me speaking outside of the approved government and WHO/WEF narrative concerning COVID-19 policies. — Robert W. Malone
Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. — Linda Grant
The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world. — Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Whether it's foreign money or hiding emails, these stories are creating a narrative about Hillary Clinton trying to be above everyone else and operating under her own set of rules. — Dana Perino
We impose order and narrative on everything in order to understand it. Otherwise, there's nothing but chaos. — Julianne Moore
Every person born into the world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique....If there had been someone like her in the world, there would have been no need for her to be born." --Martin Buber as quoted in Narrative Means for Sober Ends, by Jon Diamond, p.78 — Martin Buber
How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks. — Benjamin Zander
Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards. — Jessica Stern
Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. — W. S. Gilbert
In Conclusion
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