Personal Narrative Quotes

“In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing.

When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“The essay becomes an exercise in the meaning and value of watching a writer conquer their own sense of threat to deliver themself of their wisdom.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“The story of the self is simply the insight into the emotions of the protagonist and how he interacts with the outside world.”
― Adewale Joel, Learn Creative Writing: A guide to writing perfect drafts

“at the end of the day, the narratives, myths, and frameworks you use to make sense of the world are only approximations, they are never the truth. If you are able to pick the most suitable one for the moment or your situation , by reframing, this is an essential skill for survival in a fast changing and uncertain world.”
― Bryan Callen

“The most dangerous stories we make up are the narratives that diminish our inherent worthiness. We must reclaim the truth about our lovability, divinity, and creativity.

Lovability: Many of my research participants who had gone through a painful breakup or divorce, been betrayed by a partner, or experienced a distant or uncaring relationship with a parent or family member spoke about responding to their pain with a story about being unlovable—a narrative questioning if they were worthy of being loved.

This may be the most dangerous conspiracy theory of all. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past thirteen years, it’s this: Just because someone isn’t willing or able to love us, it doesn’t mean that we are unlovable.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution