Augmenting reality

Far from producing only weakened images of reality – shadows, as in the Platonic treatment of the eikõn in painting or writing – literary works depict reality by augmenting it with meanings that themselves depend upon the virtues of abbreviation, saturation, and culmination, so strikingly illustrated by emplotment.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 80

The history of the defeated and the lost

We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 75

Narrative and time

Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 52

The extension of expectation and memory

It is in the soul, hence as an impression, that expectation and memory possess extension. But the impression is in the soul only inasmuch as the mind acts, that is, expects, attends, and remembers.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 19

Time is a distention of the soul

Since I measure the movement of a body by time and not the other way around – since a long time can only be measured by a short time – and since no physical movement offers a fixed unit of measurement for comparison, the movement of the stars being assumed to be variable – it remains that the extension of time is a distention of the soul.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) pp. 15-16