Kevin Powers Quotes

When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open.

Never trust the storyteller. Only trust the story.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

It is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.

I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true [...].

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.

A necessary part of our intelligence is on the line as the oral tradition becomes less and less important. There was a time throughout our land when it was common for stories to be told and retold, a most valuable exercise, for the story retold is the story reexamined over and over again at different levels of intellectual and emotional growth.

Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

For the spell is older than experience. For the tale is older than the record.

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as it was said to me.