The Ethics of Narrative Quotes

“Sartre, in his autobiography, Les mots (The Words), limited his life story to the period between ages four and eleven.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Where do you begin? Where do you end? How do you choose the most significant events”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“build into their narratives signs of the difficulties of narrativization,”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Stories are a way of distilling meaning out of fact.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“This means that history is not a science in the modern, physical sciences sense of the term, that it does not explain by the discovery and application of causal laws to bodies of empirical “data,”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“It is the tropological structure of narrativizations that renders them comparable to myth.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“every story, whether of real or of imaginary entities and processes, seeks to make wholes out of particulars by the use of devices of literary writing:”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“multi-emplottable.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“What is involved is not the fictionalization of real events, but a change in the mode of relating beginnings and endings of stories.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“facts are themselves constructed out of evidence of past events by description.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“to think that events of the past require a way of explanation different from those present in the scientific culture of a given time would be a mistake.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“it is description itself that, in historiographical discourse, creates the fact.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Arthur Danto has argued, a fact is “an event under a description,”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“pathos and especially the pathos of suffering is more effectively produced by images than by concepts.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“the passages I have cited are all literary genres or devices: epigraph, ekphrasis, anecdote, commentary, and figure.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“the technique of presentation very close to that recommended by Walter Benjamin for modernist historiography: namely, the genre of the “constellation” and the preference for the verbal image over the concept in the depiction of experiences”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“The choice by any historian to cast his or her work in the mode of a “narrative” is already to move it out of the discourses of science and into the domain of “literature.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Deleuze’s argument implies that the historian’s account of events long past and no longer accessible by direct observation or experience could be likened less to a copy of such events (the mimetic thesis of realistic representation) than to a simulacrum.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“in historical writing, as in writing in general, the form of the presentation was an element of the content as well.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“how art can complement, rather than undermine, science.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Any effort to reassess the historical significance of “the Sixties” in US society must entail a reassessment of what is meant by a specifically “historical” assessment in the first place.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“internal colonization”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“(as in the American Revolution of 1776, which, as Edmund Burke argued, was a revolution on behalf of tradition and against the new practices and regimens of a British Empire)”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“the ease with which professional historians all over the world adapted to the ideological requirements of the totalitarian states of the interwar period undermined history’s status as the enlightened or progressive discipline it was thought to be during the liberal nineteenth century.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“context” is an ambiguous concept: how extended in space and time would this context be? Moreover, where does the event end and the context begin? Finally, what is the nature of the relationship between the event and its context? Is it causal, mutually implicative, structural, expressive, or what?”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Kermode rejects the idea that historians “find” the stories they tell in the events they study.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“stories do not inhere in sets of real events.”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“Kenneth Burke) “dramatistically.” In”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“A narrative was considered to be a form of discourse peculiarly suitable to the representation of series of events of the kind called “historical” (rather than “natural” or “supernatural”).”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017

“longing for meaning”
― Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 2007–2017