Quotes about storytelling9/25/2023 ![]() "Words, too, have genuine substance-mass and weight and specific gravity." "The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about what the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human." ![]() Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. "Stories are for joining the past to the future. "Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth." "The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. The harder the situation, the more essential it is." "Storytelling is the essential human activity. ![]() Here are 10 meditations drawn from his writing for you to consider as you navigate the path to telling your own story of the things you carry. As described for the NEA Big Read library, The Things They Carried is "part memoir, part fiction and O'Brien-the original master of truthiness-wishes you luck figuring out which is which." That relationship between truth and Truth,and the necessity of storytelling to articulating the difference, remains one of O'Brien's central preoccupations. It forms its own kind of simple, quiet hell-we, like Offred, are trapped within the echo-chamber of her mind.Nearly 30 years ago Tim O'Brien published his novel The Things They Carried, about the experience of being a foot soldier in the Vietnam War. With more stories and memories than current-time actions, the book is profoundly repetitive. Another is her creative ideas about what Nick might think of her and the Commander’s relationship. One major example is her long imaginary recreation of Aunt Lydia and Janine talking about Moira. Since she has no access to any entertainment, and very few events happen in her life, she often goes over events from other people’s points of view, making up very involved fictions about what others might be thinking and saying. ![]() This form of storytelling is most clear in her imaginings about Luke’s fate, where he could be dead, imprisoned or maybe escaped.įourth, Offred also uses storytelling as a pastime. She’s filled with questions-is Ofglen a true believer, or lying? Is Nick’s touching her foot accidental, or intentional? Offred must keep several stories in mind at once, imagining each to be true at the same time. ![]() A third form of storytelling comes about because of the constant atmosphere of paranoia and uncertainty. These small flashbacks can be triggered by the slightest impression, and they occur so often throughout the novel that it seems like Offred lives in several worlds, the terrible present, the confusing but free past, and the Rachel and Leah Center that bridged them.Īdding to the overlap of past and present, the tenses are always shifting, with some memories in the past tense, and some in the present. For another, her whole story is also punctuated by shorter stories she tells herself, of the time before Gilead or Aunt Lydia’s lessons. For one, the title itself, and the fictional “Historical Notes on the Handmaid’s Tale” of the book’s end, frame the entire novel as Offred’s story, that she’s said into a tape recorder in the old fashioned storytelling tradition. The structure of The Handmaid’s Tale is characterized by many different kinds of storytelling and fiction-making. ![]()
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