#narrator

I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before. ↗

— Rick Moody

#because #before #big #big deal #character

A LAST NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR I am hunted by humans. ↗

— Markus Zusak

#humans #liesl #narrator #sad #stupid

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#narrator #the-great-gatsby #remember

A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so. ↗

— Eyvind Johnson

#achieved #achievements #against #back #backdrop

In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be. ↗

— John McTiernan

#camera #narrator #thriller

It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That's why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a liar. ↗

— David Attenborough

#commercials #figure #i #liar #motherhood

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller. ↗

— Jennifer Haigh

#families #narrators #perspective #religion #secrets

... I believe in some sense much akin to the belief of faith, that I noticed, felt, or underwent what I describe—but it may be that the only reason childhood memories act on us so strongly is that, being the most remote we possess, they are the worst remembered and so offer the least resistance to that process by which we mold them nearer and nearer to an ideal which is fundamentally artistic, or at least nonfactual; so it may be that some of these events I describe never occurred at all, but only should have, and that others had not the shades and flavors—for example, of jealousy or antiquity or shame—that I have later unconsciously chosen to give them... ↗

— Gene Wolfe

#memories #memory #unreliable-narrator #faith

I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free. Character building, my father said. Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh. Still, it was better than jail. I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't. ↗

— Laurie Halse Anderson

#community-service #hard-labor #wit #satan

Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself. ↗

— James Lee Burke

#hearing #inside #matter #narrator #simply