Selected narrative quotes

1. I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

2. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

3. Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among whom, our doctor followed his profession.

4. History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

5. My life shows a clear pattern of total unpredictability.

6. Oliver Twist has asked for more!

7. Sex, without society as its landscape, has never been of much interest to fiction.

8. Biographers, the quick in pursuit of the dead, research, organize, fill in, contradict, and make in this way a sort of completed picture puzzle with all the scramble turned into a blue eye and the parts of the right leg fitted together.

9. There was a very consistent creation of a virtual reality, and eventually it collided with our old-fashioned, ordinary reality.

10. Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

11. He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?

12. People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.

13. Nothing in this book is true.

14. And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.

15. My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

16. Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

17. Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.'

18. Strange as it may seem, my life is based on a true story.

19. 'Terrorists don't take black hostages. Thats the truth. I have yet to see one of us on the news reading a hostage letter. Like, 'Uh...they is treatin us good. Uh we are chillin and shit. I'd like to give a shout out to Ray-Ray an Big Steve and uh, send some Newports!' '

20. This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

21. The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

22. An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

23. The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction can not so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges...

24. 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.

25. History would be a wonderful thing - if it were only true.

26. No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.

27. All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

28. There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.

29. Autobiography is never entirely true. No one can get the right perspective on himself. Every fact is colored by imagination and dream. The young look forth across the sea to a mirage of fairylands filled with hidden treasures; the aged turn to the fading past, and through the mist and haze that veils once familiar scenes, bygone events assume weird and fanciful proportions.

30. For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not - and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.

31. End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. (628.13 to 3.3)

32. Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

33. Clay swings with his left, Clay swings with his right, Look at young Cassius carry the fight. Liston keeps backing, but there's not enough room, It's a matter of time till Clay lowers the boom. Liston is still rising, now Clay lands with a right, What a beautiful swing, and the punch raises the Bear clean out of the ring. Liston is still rising and the ref wears a frown, For he can't start counting till Sonny goes down. Now Liston is disappearing from view, The crowd is going frantic, But radar stations have picked him up, Somewhere over the Atlantic. Who would have thought when they came to the fight? That they'd witness the launching of a human satellite. Yes the crowd did not dream, when they put up the money, That they would see a total eclipse of the Sonny.

34. We may need simple and heroic legends for that peculiar genre of literature known as the textbook. But historians must also labor to rescue human beings from their legends in science-if only so that we may understand the process of scientific thought aright.

35. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

36. I associated much of Christian doctrine with children's stories because I grew up in church. My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.

37. And for a long time yet, led by some wondrous power, I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.

38. Reader, I married him.

39. Life doesn't happen in chapters- at least, not regular ones. Nor do movies. Homer didn't write in chapters. I can see what their purpose is in children's books ('I'll read to the end of the chapter, and then you must go to sleep') but I'm blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults.

40. Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

41. Arma virumque cano.

42. Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

43. History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

44. In order to make it look dramatic, they staged what was ridiculed by some Israeli commentators, correctly, they staged a national trauma... There was a huge media extravaganza, you know, pictures of a little Jewish boy try to hold back the soldiers destroying his house... And a lot of the settlers were allowed in, so there could be a pretense of violence, though there wasn't any... The withdrawal could have been done perfectly quietly. All that was necessary was for Israel to announce that on August 1st the army will withdraw. And immediately the settlers, who had been subsidized to go there in the first place, and to stay there, would get on to the trucks that are provided for them and move over to the West Bank where they can move into new subsidized settlements. But if you did that way, there wouldn't have been any national trauma, any justification for saying, 'never can we give up another 1 mm? of land'. What made all of this even more ridiculous was that it was a repetition of what was described in Haaretz as 'Operation National Truama 1982'. After Israel finally agreed to Sadat's 1971 offer, they had to evacuate northeastern Sinai, and there was another staged trauma, which again was ridiculed by Israel commentators. By a miracle, none of the settlers who were resisting needed a Band-Aid, while Palestinians were being killed all over the place.

45. What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.

46. But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

47. Ghostwritten's secret agenda is to offer up eight different answers to the question, 'Why do things happen?' so it has the right to monkey about with time and history. number9dreams's secret agenda is to offer eight different answers to the question, 'In what space does the mind operate?'

48. Myth is the nothing that is all.

49. To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.

50. A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

51. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

52. Each one writes history according to his convenience.

53. The choice of Rizal as a national hero was a master stroke by the Americans.

54. The cultural heroine of my generation... before feminist writing got bogged down in victimisation.

55. 'Next up... Dudleyville!'

56. What on earth do you want? The question is settled. There are no more Armenians.

57. What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history ? A fable agreed upon.

58. A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.

59. The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

60. It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

61. With a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner.

62. History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion - i.e., none to speak of.

63. What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It's not very factual on motorcycles, either.

64. 'I mean, we haven't seen many people, but I know they're up ahead, and whenever there's a Tower involved, there's a man. You wait for the man because you gotta meet the man, and in the end money talks and bullshit walks, or maybe here it's bullets instead of bucks that do the talking. So is that it? Saddle up? Go to meet the man? Because if it's just a replay of the same old shitstorm, you two should have left me for the lobsters.' Eddie looked at him with dark-ringed eyes. 'I been dirty, man. If I found out anything, it's that I don't want to die dirty.'

65. 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.

66. An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain

67. The Cry for Myth (1991)