narrative

We think that history is created in the big things, in the big events, but history is also created in the small things that we do every day, in the personal choices we make_ to think or not to think, to hold our tongues or to speak up, to act or not to act. Our actions have a ripple effect on those around us. Every time we conform or don't, we're shaping the world into our vision or someone else's vision. The universe isn't made up of atoms it's made up of stories, and these stories are shaped in college campuses and coffee houses around the country, not just in boardrooms and government buildings.

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.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

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

Above all, readers want useful information, whether from a road sign or an investment guide. This motive is not completely absent even in readers of fiction, although few people read Madame Bovary for straightforward advice on how not to run a marriage. At a more abstract level, readers want a narrative that makes the world seem to make sense, and they sometimes choose stories that fit with their worldview rather than stories that fit the facts.

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative _ the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

Discovering an inner history requires listening _ and often not to the first story told.

Parables release the adrenaline of urgency into our bloodstream.

The press-savy Lincoln looked not to the future, but to the past.

We need to know not only what is done but what is purposed and said by those who shape the destines of states and realms." Horace Greeley

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.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers_ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children__ games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

Stories were heirlooms in these parts.

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon

Lewis wanted us to understand that the inner world is shaped by stories.