Narratology Quotes & Sayings

Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to. — Joseph Campbell

For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the swarming nations are now in full career. — John Lothrop Motley

When one 'we' gets to determine standards for all 'we's' then some 'we's' are in trouble. — Lisa Delpit

... it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were readers of themselves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass ... by which I could give them the means to read within themselves. — Marcel Proust

We want the author to give us answers when all he can do is give us desires. — Eric Karpeles

Literature keeps presenting the most vicious things to us an entertainment, but what it appeals to is not any pleasure of these things, but the exhilaration of standing apart from them and being able to see them for what they are because they aren't really happening. The more exposed we are to this, the less likely we are to find an unthinking pleasure in cruel or evil things. As the eighteenth century said in a fine mouth-filling phrase, literature refines our sensibilities. — Northrop Frye

In England, I suppose I have been known to once or twice tune into 'Big Brother', which is a pretty terrible guilty pleasure. — Freddie Stroma

Empathy is the driving force behind the experience of emotions in narratives (Keen, 2006; Mar et al., 2006; Oatley, 2011). — Mikkel Wallentin

Americans tended to think of war as something that had to be done from time to time, for a particular purpose or goal. They fought not for the sake of fighting but for the sake of winning. — David Hackett Fischer

In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for. — Will Self

It seems like in the beginning of my flight, the space dreams were rare. And now, almost 150 days into it, the Earth dreams are more of the rare ones. — Scott Kelly

So, you may ask, what is the use of studying the world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go to the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous. — Northrop Frye

Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it. — Madeleine L'Engle

In our society, as people pass out of young adulthood, they tend to relate to themselves more in terms of what they are no longer than what they are now, and that's psychologically low-grade devastating. — Marianne Williamson

There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told. — Ciaran Carson

Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities. — Willie Van Peer

You may not lead by ordering, but you may lead by showing possibilities and the beauty of success. — Debasish Mridha

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers. — Julian Barnes

[I]ndividual readers may conceivably choose (or be led) to regard a given text as literary in cases where such a response is not shared by others, but until their individual responses lose their idiosyncratic nature by being adopted by a larger interpretive community, such responses will be regarded as being to a greater or lesser degree aberrant, and the offender will be regarded as lacking in good taste or good sense or both. — Patrick O'Neill

Our rights come from nature and God, not government. — Paul Ryan

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Readers don't want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions ... Readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face down unimaginable terrors, to solve impossible puzzles, to feel a lightning jolt of adrenaline. — Randy Ingermanson