Collective Narrative Quotes

America is the story of everyday people who did extraordinary things. A story woven deep into the fabric of our society.

One of the things I find exciting about Joan of Arc is how clearly the story of her life reveals the creation of myth, a process in which every one of us is involved - every one of us who tells stories and all those who listen, each informing the other.

The biographies of slaves can hardly be individualized; they belong to the class. We know bare facts; it is only the general experience of human beings in like condition which can clothe them with life. The outlines are certain, the details are inferential.

It's not easy for a film to tell a story of the experiences of an entire society. However, from an individual's perspective, it is possible to tell one aspect of an entire society's story.

I think we go through the world feeling alone and singular, and you forget that your one story is probably the same as millions of people's stories. Maybe with different specifics. But a lot of people experience the same things.

The truth came slowly like a story told by people interrupting each other.

History is a novel for which the people is the author.

I have my own story, and I love my story, but I know I can't tell it alone, not now. Because stories have centers, but they don't have edges. No boundaries.

When you're writing about one community, in a way, you're writing about all communities.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

I always knew from the beginning that this was the only way to write Then We Came To The End - that it had to be in first - person plural if it was going to illustrate how the individual becomes part of the collective. I had no interest in writing the book in a more conventional voice. It goes back to that fascination I had with telling a story in multiple ways. It was the only choice I gave myself, really - I said "This is it, pal. If you can't tell a story this way, you're going to have to abandon the book. Write it this way or give up."

The story of one person is the story of all of humanity.

If you're constantly being reminded of the ways in which your history and your narrative as a people were rooted in loss and decay, then you're in deep trouble. Once you make a certain kind of peace with the past, then you should be completely oriented towards speculation about the future.

History is a novel whose author is the people.

If you read a story with an 'I' or a 'he' or a 'she,' you're in familiar territory - but 'we' is mostly unexplored. I think of 'we' as an adventure.

The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.

The world ultimately is what we say it is.

I believe there's no such thing as history; there's only historians, and in English, we've got this word 'his'tory, but what about her story? So that, in the end, the history of the world would be a history of every single one of its members, but of course, you could never get to grips with that.

I'm being provided with some emotional ballast by giving me an intimate portrait of one character in particular in contrast to the collective. I'm fortunate that I had very sympathetic readers, but ordinarily - if a book makes you laugh too much, it shifts from "literature" to "entertainment."

The truth is we're all part of one big content universe.

I tell my story, not because it is unique, but because it is not. It is the story of many girls.

There is no simple answer for what it means to be Canadian. There are a thousand answers that come together. But part of that is that there is a national mythology.

I think when we get to a place that this is not the story, that everyone's story is a part of the story, then we can say this has changed. Until then, these are steps to change if they're consistent.

Life, individual or collective, personal or historic, is the one entity in the universe whose substance is compact of danger, of adventure. It is, in the strict sense of the word, drama. The primary, radical meaning of life appears when it is employed in the sense not of biology, but of biography. For the very strong reason that the whole of biology is quite definitely only a chapter in certain biographies, it is what biologists do in the portion of their lives open to biography.

There were many African Americans - many, many stories similar to my story.