Narrative Analysis Quotes

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

History should be written as philosophy.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

I don't think I ever watched a movie without being totally immersed in the story. But at the same time, I had to keep some distance from it. I had to question what the narrative was trying to tell me or was injecting in my brain.

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.

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.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

We need narrative; it feeds us in a particular way, and deconstructing it completely before you've actually experienced it, I think it leaves us unfed.

A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.

You know how we always said 'Devil May Cry 5''s themes were about photorealism and the uncanny valley? That was a lie. The real themes centered around setbacks and awakenings.

We need to discuss what our own standards are for games writing that falls outside of journalism, and support experimental formats and routes of production that may be more tailored to them than the status quo, because the public at large seems to still think that the only games writing that exists are reviews and news.

If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book...it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.

I like dramas because there's a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.

Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.

A lot of times, I think broadcast commentators can get bogged down with stats and personal agendas.

My work is focused on using data to tell stories and explore our common humanity.

The people who write official histories for the Army believe that a generation needs to pass before you can tackle the official history. It's useful to have some distance. Sources become available. Passions cool. It allows an opportunity to make some real assessments and judgments about personalities and characters.

Nursery rhymes were political when they were first written! To me, that's what it's about: it's about using it to say something more than just what the story is.

I've always felt that the traditional novel doesn't give you enough information about the narrator, and I think it's important to know the point of view from which these tales are told: the moral makeup of the teller.

The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it.

There's a literal track: who says what to whom, what are people wearing, etcetera. And there's the abstract track: what ideas are suggested by the literal. And the real movie takes place in the relationship between the literal and the abstract.

I do think that narrative is very important - I think that we use narrative to organize the world around us, and so it does matter a lot what kinds of narratives we have in our inventories and which ones are reinforced so often and so strongly that we habitually reach for them without thinking.