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Narratives Quotes

We’ve collected the best Narratives Quotes from the greatest minds of the world: Alice Roberts, Matthew Tobin Anderson, Christopher Wylie, Brian Eno, Sarah Weinman. Use them as an inspiration.

1
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A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.
3
Fashion data was used to build AI models to help Steve Bannon build his insurgency and build the alt-right. We used weaponized algorithms. We used weaponized cultural narratives to undermine people and undermine the perception of reality. And fashion played a big part in that.
4
My shows are not narratives.
5
True-crime shows and podcasts aren’t the only ones flattening the complexity of forensic science into easy-to-grasp narratives: journalists do so, too. They say DNA or trace evidencematches‘ a suspect, when scientists can’t be so definitive.
6
The designs of the paper euros, introduced in 2002, proclaim a utopian aspiration. Gone are the colorful bills of particular nations, featuring pictures of national heroes of statecraft, culture and the arts, pictures celebrating unique national narratives. With the euro, 16 nations have said goodbye to all that.
7
The film industry is driven by male narrative. Heads of studios are often men, teeming with male executives everywhere you look, and so the narratives we have the screenwriters usually for male leads. Women tend to be second string: the girlfriend of, the secretary who becomes.
8
Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They’re devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.
9
There’s a long history of anthropomorphic animals in Japanese literature. The so-calledfunny animal scrolls’ were the first narratives in Japanese history, and the heroes of many folk tales have animals as their companions.
Stan Sakai
10
I think that there are all these amazing figures in our history – the Bowies, the Tina Turners, the Chers, the people who are, in many ways, genderless or represent ‘the other’ – and I want pop music, and other queer artists – Kehlani, Perfume Genius – these people are bringing queer narratives into people’s minds.
11
I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
12
What I appreciate about Radiohead‘s work – and it’s most evident in ‘Hail to the Thief‘ – is how the juxtaposition of narratives on the band‘s albums somehow creates a sense of wholeness.
13
There are two distinctly, almost surreally different narratives in Israel and Palestine… and to a great extent, both are right and both are wrong. Both peoples have suffered greatly and both have legitimate grievances against the other.
14
I was an English major in college who concentrated in African-American literature and culture. So I read quite a few slave narratives and stories of escape, and I grew up in Ohio, which was a common stop on the Underground Railroad.
15
In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It’s hard to shake those sort of narratives.
16
Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified – and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger.
17
Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.
18
We go through life owned by the stories we tell ourselves which are often historic and charged narratives – things we’ve learnt since childhood that we don’t even consciously realise are going on.
19
I am and always have been fascinated with people, and I have a very good time coming up with the narratives of people’s lives, exploring how a person thinks and feels.
20
There are very very few narratives in mainstream that are actually about the woman.
21
If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems?
22
Confronting and undermining the narratives and ideas of extremism must therefore be one of our key tasks. To do this, we must retain the courage of our convictions in the face of extremism.
Jonas Gahr Store
23
Like every Canadian, I have been taught that one of the most important functions of art is to supply and elaborate the myths and narratives of nationhood.
24
The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
25
The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, ‘Cairo,’ sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.
26
In high school, I began to dig my way into Ethiopian history, and began to understand myself as a young man formed by multiple narratives.
27
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.
28
When I began ‘All Our Names,’ I did so wanting to create parallel narratives between Africa in the nineteen-seventies and America during that same period.
29
The sheer number of legendary narratives and historically verifiable incidents invites us to revise assumptions about the origins of biological and chemical warfare and its moral and technological constraints.
30
I’m a fan of classic romance films as well as screwball comedies. I think love stories are just compelling narratives.
31
The Voting Rights Act was a seminal victory for our country and a great healing moment. But there are some who want to continue to drive divisions and create phony narratives.
32
We are used to women‘s narratives being defined through the male perspective. I challenge that as a concept.
33
For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors – which is the logic of narratives in generalover reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.
34
That slave narratives existed at all implied a satisfactory conclusion to the journey – the attainment of literacy, the escape to the place where one could reflect on the experience of bondage and the flight to freedom, and, in the early days of the slave trade, the conversion to Christianity.
35
I’m often associated with parallel narratives or dual narratives. The ‘Devil in the White City’ was a fluke.
36
The whole class system has oppressed so many people and given them such lack of opportunity. They are fed such strong narratives that this is where you belong and this is where you are.
37
We’re all building our narratives in our heads.
38
I think we have become oversaturated with tired fictional narratives.
39
I’ve always been interested in war, but especially its effects on society, which means bringing in the voices of women, which aren’t heard as much in the grand narratives.
40
We all have different narratives; all of our narratives are at different stages of development.
41
The slave narratives, there is a wealth of research there, because you are hearing stories from the first person account, and that’s a whole different thing than reading about it in the history books. You’re able to really personalize it.
42
President Trump not only lies with astonishing temerity and abandon, but those lies connect into equally false narratives that gin up the worst fears and prejudices of his base.
43
There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential – it’s as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.
44
There’s a problem with narratives. Most that spring to mind are fictional.
45
We usually center our narratives that come out of Hollywood from a white male center.
46
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
47
Pervasive ‘whites-only’ policies and hateful narratives could not be further from the values that underpin our Armed Forces: those of integrity, respect for others, and having the bravery to do the right thing.
48
When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.
49
There are many reasons I love novels with multiple narratives. In novels where the events are filtered through the consciousness of a singlereliablenarrator, I often wonder, is this the whole story? What could be missing here?
Susan Barker
50
I think literary theory satisfied a deep love I have for big, encompassing narratives about the world and how it works – which are usually, in the end, more creative visions unto themselves than illuminating explanations.
51
Fashion has always captivated me because, like I said, it has the potential to create narratives about what’s beautiful, aspirational, chic, masculine, feminine, glamorous, etc. Generally, this power is dispatched in useless ways.
52
Usually superheroes with all their powers and action-driven narratives are supposed to appeal to boys and men more than women; and as an extension of that, it is a given that the creators of these characters are primarily men.
53
The way that China has been described in Western narratives makes it hard to tell a story that will escape the stereotypes and allow people to perceive it fresh.
54
As cinema is a reflection of the world around us, with more women coming into the mainstream business, more women narratives will grab the limelight.
55
If you do a sketch, that’s a very short narrative. Stand-up, it’s bit-to-bit, minute-long narratives.
56
I’m one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I’ve been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola.
57
The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit.
58
A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration.
Richard Schickel
59
Slave narratives had their greatest influence on public opinion and on literature in the U.S. between 1830 and 1860. After Reconstruction‘s defeat, their urgency of tone was replaced by the softer one of reminiscence.
60
My first album, ‘Englaborn,’ was based on music originally written for the theatre. My solo albums, like ‘IBM 1401, a User‘s Manual‘ and ‘Fordlandia,’ have also had narratives attached to them.
61
I think there are narratives going on all the time that we think of as tangential – up until they turn out to be deciding factors in our lives.
62
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.
63
If you construct political narratives around the psychodramas of politicians, even when they don’t invite it, you open the way for those who can play this game more effectively.
64
Historical facts are the vital framework around which non-fiction writers construct their narratives; they are, quite simply, indispensable.
65
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.
66
Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, ‘Who’s choreographing this stuff?’
67
We have been fed so many false narratives, many of them racialized to deliberately feed a racist agenda. It’s important to address and dig into that wherever you can.
68
ESPN is the exact network Deadspin desired. It’s diverse on its surface, progressive in its point of view, and more concerned with spinning media narratives than with the quality of its product.
69
People are deeply interested in rewriting the established narratives and challenging what we see as the norm in every way. We want to see a new definition of beauty and sexy. We want to see different people look vulnerable and show strength and redefine what it means to be strong.
70
Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.
71
Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.
72
Even in the days of early YouTube, we always focused on narratives, and we always focused on franchises. We didn’t do a lot of vlogging and stuff like that.
73
While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.
74
Shakespeare is so fundamental to the way we see story. A tremendous amount of narratives come from him – more than many authors are aware, I think.
75
The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn’t really have that present in my house.
76
The religious imagery and fairytales that formed our shared cultural references have been replaced by the cult of celebrity. Marilyn is the sex goddess, Camilla Parker Bowles is cast as the wicked witch, Che Guevara is the revolutionary. Celebrities have become visual shorthand for narratives that shape our lives.
77
Basketball games – and seasons – make great narratives; they feature distinct acts, heroes and villains, and guaranteed resolutions.
78
I studied African American studies, and I read these slave narratives and the escape narratives of people that were able to escape slavery and always found those stories intriguing and powerful and inspiring.
79
Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I’m always looking beyond the surface. I’ve done that ever since I first picked up a camera.
80
Television is ever more ambitious, more akin to the Victorian novel with multiple narratives and more discursive material.
81
I offer detailed but mostly invented narratives about the provenance of my books.
82
Digression is my passion. I’m not kidding. I love telling the main stories, but in some ways, what I love most is using those narratives as a way of stringing together the interesting stories that people have kind of forgotten and that are kind of surprising.
83
I’m mostly drawn to narratives that are difficult for me to visualize.
Dana Schutz
84
I don’t see a lot of narratives written where a woman who looks like me gets to be beautiful and sexualized and upwardly mobile, middle-class, funny, quirky. They’re very seldom written.
85
I think we assume a lot about both genders. But in particular I think we assume that only boys play games and that boys are only interested in playing games that reflect their narratives and their interests.
Ashly Burch
86
I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They’re amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they’d just be amazing documentarians.
87
The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.
88
‘Game of Thrones’ is the broadest of narratives. I don’t know if anyone in the U.S. has done a story on such a large scale before, both in terms of what George R.R. Martin wrote and what’s on the show.
89
I’ve always been interested in the manufacturing of narratives, identities, and ideologies, and how they are embodied and negotiated by viewers.
90
The language of chemistry simply does not mesh with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react, whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation. Informational narratives permeate biology.
91
President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives.
92
Historically, narratives of forgiveness were part of both the anti-slavery movement and the civil rights movement in America. ‘Uncle Tom‘s Cabin,’ for instance, was based loosely on the life of the Rev. Josiah Henson, who forgave his master that wanted to sell him and beat him after Henson begged him not to.
93
‘Pierrot le Fou’ is something I keep coming back to. It’s so surreal but still really engaging – it proves narratives within narratives are a landscape that can be pursued well.
94
People always want narratives to be clean and easy.
95
I’m endlessly intrigued by stories, and I love helping someone to formulate his or her story. I can drift off when I’m reading pure abstraction, but the narratives of human lives hold my attention every time.
96
Most people aren’t familiar enough with what actually goes on in professional wrestling to know just how badly women are treated in WWE narratives.
97
If you’re anything other than a white, cisgender, able-bodied dude, people are going to project narratives, imagery, and context onto you that you might not necessarily see for yourself.
98
Continuing to push narratives that are progressive and that are coming from a place of love and acceptance is so important.
99
Blog culture has a hard time digesting narratives, but it has an easy time digesting ‘big ideas‘ pieces.
100
Pity sidesteps complexity in favor of narratives that we’re comfortable with, reducing the nuances of a person’s experience to a sound bite.
101
I plan less and less. It’s a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
102
Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven‘t had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves, but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional.
103
One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.
Joseph O’Neill
104
I inhaled books. I loved Classics Illustrated comic books. These were books that I could afford to buy after I turned in pop bottles for change. ‘The Prince and the Pauper,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘A Journey to the Center of the Earth.’ Male narratives filled with adventure and self-discovery.
105
It’s very white in Guernsey, not racist, but there’s not a lot of understanding about different cultures there. So I grew up there then moved to Brighton and found all these other people with different experiences, different narratives.
106
There is an enduring feeling that women can write domestic dramas but don’t have the muscularity or the vision to write state-of-the-nation narratives.
107
My whole life I’ve tried to find the thing I can do that other people can’t do, and invest in that, and the one thing I can do is write narratives and build characters. I can do that.
108
A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions.
109
In documentaries, there’s a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.
110
North Korea aside, most authoritarian governments have already accepted the growth of the Internet culture as inevitable; they have little choice but to find ways to shape it in accord with their own narratives – or risk having their narratives shaped by others.
111
You can get good at finding access in the entertainment business. But the ideas, the narratives themselves, they are the only things that are going to be of any value.
112
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.
113
‘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
114
Progress has always been understood to be driven by exceptional white men. Whether it’s the military victories we’ve achieved, the philosophical foundations that are the underpinnings of the nation, or our economic ingenuity, all this has been articulated through narratives of exceptional white men.
115
The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesusinnocence and, little by little, that of all analogous victims.
116
I am probably an outsider because I challenge conventional narratives about who should have a seat at the table.
117
From making documentaries all these years, it doesn’t feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I’m always trying to shoot as though it’s really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I’m going to be following. I want to follow them.
118
In everything I’ve written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don’t have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it’s a way of getting a plot moving.
Peter Temple
119
When I see a league with a lot of change and turnover, yes, there’s a lot of big narratives out there, but I see opportunity.
120
I’m very interested in foundational narratives.
121
The narratives in which you’re born have a fierce pattern of repetition.