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Narrative Structure Quotes

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane,

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

Anthony Doerr
Narrative Structure, Miracle, Chocolate
Anthony Doerr (2008). “Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World”, p.54, Simon and Schuster

But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better.

Marisha Pessl
Sweet, School, Narrative Structure
Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.83, Penguin

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

Don DeLillo
Narrative Structure, Vision, Literature
Don DeLillo, Thomas DePietro (2005). “Conversations with Don DeLillo”, p.84, Univ. Press of Mississippi

The F.B.I. was very happy with the article they produced, which was entitled, "The Black Merchants of Hate," that came out in early 1963. What's significant about that piece is that that became the template for what evolved into the basic narrative structure of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Manning Marable
Hate, Narrative Structure, Black
"The Undiscovered Malcolm X: Stunning New Info on the Assassination, His Plans to Unite the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements & the 3 'Missing' Chapters from His Autobiography". "Democracy Now!" with Amy Goodman, www.democracynow.org. February 21, 2005.

In fact, I always assumed that most everything I read was true, to one degree or another. I couldn't articulate this fact until after I read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and he discussed Happening Truth, Story Truth, and Emotional Truth. I always understood that the facts of The Sun Also Rises or On the Road were the facts as dictated by a certain narrative structure, but because the experiences of those characters echoed my own feelings about the world. I knew there was a Happening Truth behind them.

Kevin Keck
Character, Emotional, Narrative Structure
Source: therumpus.net

The ultimate for me would be to do a feature that didn't require any narrative structure.

Johnny Depp
Narrative Structure, Would Be, Ultimate
"Going deep with rebel Johnny Depp" by Ron Dicker, articles.baltimoresun.com. July 8, 2003.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

John Dufresne
Narrative Structure, Anxiety, Causes
John Dufresne (2014). “No Regrets, Coyote”, p.7, Serpent's Tail

He managed to do this 'tour de force' of styles without ever breaking the narrative structure of the chapter he was writing. It is the most brilliant parody of writing styles that I have ever read.

Frederick Lenz
Writing, Narrative Structure, Style

That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.

Edward Hirsch
Character, Order, Narrative Structure
Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I'm a professional student of music.

Anthony Braxton
Narrative Structure, Guy, Intellectual

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