Quotes about Narrative

But humans want to usurp the place of God, making themselves the center of the Story.

as life is a story, so also is spiritual formation a story—a journey from earth to heaven.

That is, until we find the story that leads us to the gospel claim that Jesus is the Messiah, we don't have the Bible's story right.

It is impossible for us to indwell this Story and not assume that narrative's perspective. Again, that perspective is God's perspective. It is not our perspective; it is God's perspective. It is God's perspective on us, not our perspective on others.

Until we learn to read the Bible as Story, we will not know how to get anything out of the Bible for daily living.

It is impossible for us to indwell this Story and not assume that narrative's perspective. Again, that perspective is God's perspective. It is not our perspective; it is God's perspective. It is God's perspective on us, not our perspective on others. Bible readers, especially pastors (and commenters on blogs), inevitably begin to think like God about ourselves and others.

No narrative that tells the facts of a man's life in the man's own words can be uninteresting.

There's no such thing as an uninteresting life, such a thing is an impossibility. Beneath the dullest exterior, there is a drama, a comedy, a tragedy.

This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. It is a record of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and it's object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science.

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.