Grand Narrative Quotes

I think what I was after was a unifying story that could bring everything together, that could give me a sense of the whole of history.

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

I love reading epic fantasies and big fat books and so I really wanted to write one. I think you always write what you want to read.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself to feed upon, even a poisonous one.

Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy fluxitself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things.

If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.

The universe has a much greater imagination than we do, which is why the real story of the universe is far more interesting than any of the fairy tales we have invented to describe it.

Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?

My studio practice is a - I suppose a bit more like [Thomas] Gainsborough or [Peter Paul] Rubens in the sense that any artist who wants to create a grand narrative on a grand scale has to sort of parse out some of the smaller aspects of painting or the more mundane aspects of painting to others.

What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete.

There's a lot of mythological stories you can tell. There's not just one. I appreciate all of those different kinds, but what I was personally missing was grand, classic, true-north hero. Pure and simple emotion, and also aiming for big time emotion, like love story as well, in a very sincere way. Like 'Superman: The Movie' had done for me.

I want to return to the epic idea of the grand, big Western, in the sense that 'The Searchers' was.

I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.

Big History studies the history of everything, offering a way of making sense of our world and our role within it.

It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science.

My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.