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. I let nothing slip, however small; and feel myself actuated by the same motive which has prompted many worthy old chroniclers, to set down the merest trifles concerning things that are destined to pass away entirely from the earth, and which, if not preserved in the nick of time, must infallibly perish from the memories of man. Who knows that this humble narrative may not hereafter prove the history of an obsolete barbarism? Who knows that, when men-of-war shall be no more, 'White-Jacket' may not be quoted to show to the people in the Millennium what a man-of-war was? God hasten the time!

42. Sixty bobbins: Blikdak was no more.

43. The last word in stolentelling! (424.35)

44. The man is ugly, the man is evil, and the man is in love. This is gonna be an American classic.

45. They came to the Delectable Mountains.

46. Swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.

47. Sleep slunk up like a black panther and sank its kindly fangs into what remained of the Mortdecai brain.

48. :modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one has asked.

49. 'Do you know what this is, Lord Vorkosigan?' Giaja asked.

50. Seems I keep getting this story twisted. So where's Neil when you need him?

51. Even if that's just bullshit, sir, it's first-rate bullshit. I'll pass it on.

52. I am going to write you into a story someday, my friend. Remember that the ultimate power is mine. You may decide what you will do in this life, up to the point. But I will decide what others think of you, and not just now but long after you're dead. (The Tales of Alvin Maker)

53. Tell the story plainly and clearly.

54. I've twisted and turned them every way, And can see no ending to our play.

55. I retaliated [against the calf worshippers] by visiting on them all manner of mischief, but I concluded, after some centuries of chronic relapsing on their part, that rage and punishment was not the best way to hold a clientele. It is only the most primitive of mortals who is swayed by that sort of thing.

56. I realized suddenly that I was in an impossible situation, and there was really no way out. No acceptable way. I could not go on - so I stopped.

57. And then they knew the perilous Rock, And blest the Abbot of Aberbrothok.

58. Bolano's narrative style is fragmented and loaded. It is also full of a strange kind of gallows humour, as we are swept along by stories that are invented and presented entirely convincingly, only to be suddenly brought up short by a reminder that this has not been done innocently.

59. It's so rare to find a movie that doesn't take sides. Conflict is said to be the basis of popular fiction, and yet here is a film that seizes us with its first scene and never lets go, and we feel sympathy all the way through for everyone in it. To be sure, they sometimes do bad things, but the movie understands them and their flaws. Like great fiction, House of Sand and Fog sees into the hearts of its characters, and loves and pities them. ... 'House of Sand and Fog' relates not a plot with its contrived ups and downs but a story. A plot is about things that happen. A story is about people who behave. To admire a story you must be willing to listen to the people and observe them, and at the end of House of Sand and Fog, we have seen good people with good intentions who have their lives destroyed because they had the bad luck to come across a weak person with shabby desires.

60. I'm not the one that's even introduced race in this, if you want to know the truth. You can go back. You can read Philadelphia sports media last year, the year before, and you can see that guys have been writing about the great things that Donovan McNabb's success means in a racial context.

61. Why make excuses close to the truth, especially when now I am presuming to try to grasp in my old age what I did not gain in my youth because my sins prevented me from making what I had read my own? But who will believe me, even though I should say it again? A young man, almost a beardless boy, I was taken captive before I knew what I should desire and what I should shun.

62. Mythology is wondrous, a balm for the soul. But its problems cannot be ignored. At worst, it buys inspiration at the price of physical impossibility [:]. At best, it purveys the same myopic view of history that made this most fascinating subject so boring and misleading in grade school as a sequential take of monarchs and battles.

63. Tzara: Causality is no longer fashionable owing to the war. Carr: How illogical, since the war itself had causes. I forget what they were, but it was all in the papers at the time. Something about brave little Belgium, wasn't it? Tzara: Was it? I thought it was Serbia... Carr: Brave little Serbia...? No, I don't think so. The newspapers would never have risked calling the British public to arms without a proper regard for succinct alliteration.

64. 'She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind.'

65. I found people were telling stories to themselves without knowing it. It seemed to me that people were living a sort of small sermon that they believed in, but at the same time it was a fairy tale. Selfish desires, along with one or two highly suspect elevated thoughts. They secretly regard themselves as works of art, valuable in themselves.

66. In the effort to tell a whole story, to see it whole and clear, I have had to imagine more than I have known.

67. Childhood lays itself out, like a novel, he suggests, complete with central observer, fixed characters, and linear plot. Later, life disperses itself into anecdotes. At twenty-one, it no longer strictly matters whether the author went first to Ireland and then to Spain, or Spain first. And after thirty, he could stitch the pages in backward for all we care.

68. That is the best story he could find in his life, never mind if it's the truest: an artist's duty is always to tell the best story.

69. I'm anxious to get back to D.C. to correct all the inaccuracies and lies that are being said.

70. The sergeant's widow told you a lie when she said I flogged her. I never flogged her. She flogged herself.

71. Aldiss' New Wave masterpiece is Report On Probability A. ... The minuteae of all the involved's lives are the only thing; the act of observation is the only plot. The science fiction happens when it becomes apparent that there are Other watchers, and watchers watching those watchers, stretching back to what seems to be citizens of our own reality. Report On Probability A is about the metaphor of circular vision, manifested in the narrative by the round fields of view of the various optical devices and windows through which S, G, and C observe their world, expanding macrocosmically with the vast circle of observers observing the observers. As banality merges with paranoia, drawn only by whatever the reader brings to the narrative, there is no conclusion, no story, only facts. The story returns over and over to the painting The Hireling Shepherd by Holman Hunt, which becomes a recurring unresolved image which has no final meaning, only whatever speculation it's benighted observers bring to bear on it. Every character is searching for a meaning which may, or may not, exist as actual Truth. Behind each level of truth lies another; who is to say how far the chain goes or which part of it is more Actual? ... The simplicity of the 'story' masks an investigation into uncertainty and the nature of reality itself. The seeming bankruptcy of plot opens the reader to question the act of observation, of reporting, of writing itself. Truth is what Report On Probability A is all about, and Aldiss points out that it is a plastic thing that depends on who is trying to figure it out, and an ambiguous thing that may, at it's root, be unknowable.

72. Oh wait, I'm getting ahead of myself Let me take you back to when it all began

73. Refrain (as sung by Mikelaus):

74. As an Englishman, particularly as an Englishman standing upon foreign soil, I am, of course, prepared to argue that every war we have ever fought was a purely defensive war. But I am obliged to take cognizance of the quite simple historical fact that for about one thousand years, since the time indeed when Norwegians ravaged our coasts and a certain Scandinavian landed at Hastings in 1066, every war we have fought happens to have been fought in other people's countries. Now if defense means merely keeping burglars out of the house, what were we doing on all those occasions in other people's houses? Our history in this respect is not peculiar. The United States is proud of her remoteness from the old world, her freedom from entanglement in its quarrels, her isolation. Yet in her relatively very short history as an independent state she has fought at least six foreign wars while her troops have landed on foreign soil on nearly a hundred occasions. Not one of those wars was for the purpose of defending American soil.

75. ...'The story the oversoul tells me fit's all the facts that I see. Your story, in which I'm endlessly deceived, can also explain all those facts. I have no way of knowing that your story is not true-but you have no way of knowing that my story isn't true. So I will choose the one that I love. I will close the one that, if it's true, makes this reality one worth living in. I'll act as if the life I hope for is real life, and the life that disgusts me-your life, your view of life-is the lie.'

76. Before the story he refused to even think about it; after the story, it became conceivable to him, and, once he could conceive of it, it soon became inevitable

77. Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs into the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again - a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the rug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking.

78. My introduction to Stephen Jay Gould's work came in the 1970s, when I avidly read all his articles in Natural History (as I still do today). In 1990, when I was asked by a London newspaper to name my favorite book, I selected Wonderful Life; this led to my receiving a letter from Stephen and to the beginning of a frequent and voluminous correspondence between us. Many subjects close to both our hearts have been discussed in letters: from the place of contingency (in evolution but also in the often unpredictable reactions of patients to illnesses and drugs) to our shared love for museums (especially the old 'cabinet' type-we both spoke out for the preservation of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia). In 1993 I wrote of ways of joining particulars with generalities-in my own case, clinical narratives with neuroscience-and he replied: 'I have long experienced exactly the same tension, trying to assuage my delight in individual things through my essays and my interest in generality through my more technical writing. I loved the Burgess Shale work so much because it allowed me to integrate the two.' I often wrote excited letters to Stephen the moment I had read his columns: in 1995, about his article on Sacculina, a meditation on whether such a life-form could be called degenerate; and in 1996, about some just-published research of his on microevolutionary processes and hybridization effects. I was especially fascinated by his 1998 article on Buffon's trajectory from his early Platonic thinking to a historical viewpoint-partly because of a similar evolution in my own thinking. Stephen is now a good friend as well as a colleague-we dine together, walk the streets together (only someone as intensely sensitive to architecture as he is would introduce spandrels as an evolutionary metaphor), celebrate birthdays together (when Stephen often exercises his talent for composing verses on the spot), go to museums and botanical gardens together. He is an enchanting companion as well as a major intellectual force, and both aspects of him come together in his unique essays.

79. If you would have your fiction live forever, you must neither overtly preach nor overtly teach; but you must covertly preach and covertly teach.

80. from '1000 Chickens Trilogy':

81. Rashomon (film)

82. The palace Beautiful.

83. Arma virumque cano.

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

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

86. 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.

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

88. 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.

89. 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?'

90. Myth is the nothing that is all.

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

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

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

94. Each one writes history according to his convenience.

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

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

97. 'Next up... Dudleyville!'

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

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

100. 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.