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In England in the 19th century, advances in printing methods, combined with the rise of a prosperous middle class, engendered a booming new industry of books published just for children. Casting about for cheap story material, English publishers laid hands on the subtle, sensual adult fairy tales of the Continental tradition and revised them into simpler stories instilled with Victorian values. Although these simplified versions retained much of the violence of the older stories, elements of sexuality and moral complexity were carefully scrubbed away -- along with the fiesty heroines who appeared everywhere in the older tales, tamed now into models of Victorian propiety and passivity. In the 20th century, the Walt Disney Studios watered down the tales further still in popular animated films like Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, continuing the trend of turning active heroines into powerless damsels in distress. Walt Disney considered even the Victorian versions of the tales too dark for 20th century audiences. Disney commented.
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feminism
fairy-tales-for-adults
magical-stories
stories
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Terri Windling |
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One may learn a great deal of a people by the stories they tell of others.
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thrawn
star-wars
stories
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Timothy Zahn |
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And so he set about restoring them, using the tricks he had learned over the years. He went to them, speaking to each of them in tones so low that none of the others could hear, getting their names, gently touching them, asking about their pains, their fears, gently eliciting their stories, reminding them of why they had run in the first place.
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love
stories
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David Bradley |
fe35fa6
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Stories aren't made of language: they're made of something else. A little earlier I said that stories were about life; perhaps they're made of life.
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writing
writing-advice
stories
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Philip Pullman |
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There's no future in stories...Stories are things of the past, things for museums.
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stories
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David Mitchell |
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"Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children's books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother's calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman. After the reading, cricket was anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof. "A modern horse would have a typewriter," thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine. ("The Pool")"
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story
storytelling
horse
children-s-books
stories
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Daphne du Maurier |
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'n jml 'wly'k l'bTl lkhylyyn fy lHkyt lys lh 'y qym@ , bl ymkn lh 'n ytHwl l~ mbrr lltfh@
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stories
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Isabel Allende |
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Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. It's no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.
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names
chaos
stories
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Madeleine L'Engle |
8d1d6dc
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Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.
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words
literature
suffering
words-have-power
stories
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Terry Tempest Williams |
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I learn about how stories work for the same reason that soldiers learn how to strip a rifle. You should, too.
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storytelling
stories
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Mike Carey |
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Stories can save us.
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the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
vietnam-war
stories
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Tim O'Brien |
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There are just as many stories to be told in the dark spots as there are in the bright ones.
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untold-stories
perspective
stories
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Jodi Picoult |
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I told her about school and how I sat on a wall there and felt stories and words move through me ...
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words
stories
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Markus Zusak |
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Just cuz you get to the end doesn't mean you know what happened.
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understanding
learning
what-happened
karen-tei-yamashita
tropic-of-orange
ending
endings
stories
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Karen Tei Yamashita |
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Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God who told stories.
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stories
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Madeleine L'Engle |
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Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group--and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside of our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories' temporal and geographical settings and are founded on unvarying fundamentals of human nature.
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specifics
universalism
storytelling
stories
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Alain de Botton |
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There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't. Sometimes the words fly over the fence and all the way out to the feelings.
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words
stories
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Adam Gopnik |
363131f
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Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently
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literature
perspective
perspective-on-life
story-telling
stories
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Jeanette Winterson |
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She told him of ship voyages she had taken to places he had never heard of, and stories he knew were all untrue, were bad non-truths, even, but he nodded and tried to convince himself to be convinced, tried to believe her, because he knew that the origin of a story is always an absence, and he wanted her to live among presences.
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lies
presence
stories
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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He did not use these things anymore, and yet, the thought of letting them go made him sad. He felt they represented times in his life he could not recall without their presence. They represented stories,
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time
things
stories
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Alice Walker |
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You think you know this story. You do not.
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stereotypes
stories
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Jane Yolen |
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When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger readers might like and published them as R Is for Rocket and S Is for Space. Now I was doing the same sort of thing, and I asked Ray if he'd mind if I called this book M Is for Magic. (He didn't.) M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...
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writing
ray-bradbury
stories
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Neil Gaiman |
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There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told.
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humiliation
resentment
stories
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Azar Nafisi |
e9f105f
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Stories are for joining the past to the future.
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the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
vietnam-war
stories
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Tim O'Brien |
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It was one of the few stories we told the same way.
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nick-and-amy
gillian-flynn
gone-girl
memory
stories
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Gillian Flynn |
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We ourselves, will resurrect the memory in order to savor it and carry it forth into the world. We will fling it at one another for laughs. Distort it. We will toss the story into the air at parties and howl over its ripeness. Degraded as it was, we will degrade it further. Make it more swollen. We shall render it impossibly awful, making of it the mythology of ourselves. A comfort. Proof of the trials we've survived.
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past
stories
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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That's where the raiders would come from, and where Wales begins. That's where the world starts to turn blue.
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past
raiders
stories
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Kevin Crossley-Holland |
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"Sure, zombies can "be a metaphor." They can represent the oppressed, as in Land of the Dead, or humanity's feral nature, as in 28 Days. Or racial politics or fear of contagion or even the consumer unconscious (Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead). We could play this game all night. But really, zombies are not "supposed to be metaphors." They're supposed to be friggin' zombies. They follow the Zombie Rules: they rise from death to eat the flesh of the living, they shuffle in slow pursuit (or should, anyway), and most important, they multiply exponentially. They bring civilization down, taking all but the most resourceful, lucky and well-armed among us, whom they save for last. They make us the hunted; all of us. That's the stuff zombies are supposed to do. Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot. But their main job is to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules, to make us begin to see the world as a place colored by our own zombie contingency plans. [...]
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zombies
stories
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Scott Westerfeld |
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Only stories and magic really endure.
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magic
the-black-prince
iris-murdoch
lasting
stories
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Iris Murdoch |
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That is the difference between you and me. You had only one story to tell.' She stops and grins once more. 'I have millions.
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death
queen-beetle
roxanne-wells
whisper-of-death
christopher-pike
storytellers
stories
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Christopher Pike |
eb8c7fc
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I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what couldI tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant. None of those things, however, came out of my mouth. All I was able to do was turn to Liesel Meminger and tell her the only truth I truly know. I said it to the book thief and I say it now to you. I am haunted by humans.
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words
humans
stories
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Markus Zusak |
a38f6b5
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What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
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the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
vietnam-war
stories
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Tim O'Brien |
4331ad9
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I was facing him before the last word was out, but I should have been dead by then. In a way I did die, right there, all that time ago, and this is a ghost who has been telling you stories and drinking your wine. You don't understand. Never mind.
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lal
lal-after-dark
lal-alone
lalkhamsin-khamsolal
never-mind
sailor-lal
swordcane-lal
telling-stories
ghosts
wine
dying
stories
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Peter S. Beagle |
89b1c05
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-in almost all stories of promises and prohibitions, the promises and prohibitions carry with them the inevitability of failure, of their own breaking.
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promise
stories
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A.S. Byatt |
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But we don't run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.
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stories
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James S.A. Corey |
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figuring out was is real isn't always possible, because our own brains are telling us stories
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reality
stories
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Pete Hautman |
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The world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.
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world
stories
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Mitch Albom |
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"Wait," Charlotte said. "I'd like to say something, if I may, Papa." He nodded, and Charlotte stood. Her siblings were still looking very grave. She hoped they were in the proper frame of mind to hear what she had to say, especially Branwell. "I have been thinking a great deal about ... My stories." She nodded significantly to them, willing them to understand that she was not talking about writing so much as about crossing over. "Papa was very wise when he called my writing a childish habit, and I think he understands that, for me, its a dangerous one as well." The small square of paper that had caused such consternation lay in front of her on the table. Now she took it up and held it out, looking at each if her siblings in turn. "Emily. Anne. Branwell." She ripped the paper in half. Emily gasped. " I am renouncing my invented worlds and all who live there. If any of you are in the grip if a similar childish habit"- she raised an eyebrow at her brother - "I challenge you to do the same."
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writing
childish
challenge
charlotte-bronte
stories
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Lena Coakley |
18b6fba
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To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.
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the-novel
transcendence
stories
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Richard Flanagan |
7566764
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"You have a long history," he said, when Lanya indicated her story was finished. "Ah, Harrier, were I to tell you a long story, we should be here for a sennight, perhaps more. Long stories are best saved for deep winter, when the days are short and time grows heavy." Lanya glanced at the sky."
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character-lanya
location-1558
james-mallory
mercedes-lackey
the-phoenix-endangered
elves
weather
stories
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Mercedes Lackey |
66bc687
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A story could lead you into a different world for a while. It might be a world where a foolish youngest son could turn into a brave and clever hero, or a beaten young woman could end up as a wise leader of folk. And when the story was ended and that world was gone, you still had the idea of it inside you. Like a flame that didn't go out even when the bad things rattled and swirled and screamed, and worse, oh, much worse, when they whispered and goaded and tormented.
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power-of-story
tales
stories
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Juliet Marillier |
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Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own.
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life
purpose
stories
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Lois Lowry |
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Sis took Eva to the public library and showed her how to get a card. Every week, Eva read her way through the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell. She dreamed of heroines from modest backgrounds attracting unprecedented attentions, soaring tales of love across social divides and sudden unexpected reversals of fortunes. In these pages, anything was possible, even for a girl like her.
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stories
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Kathleen Tessaro |
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Soll ich dir eine Geschichte erzahlen? Nein. Warum nicht? Der Junge sah ihn an und wandte den Blick ab. Warum nicht? Diese Geschichten sind nicht wahr. Das mussen sie auch nicht sein. Es sind Geschichten. Ja. Aber in den Geschichten helfen wir andauernd jemanden, dabei tun wir das in Wirklichkeit gar nicht. Warum erzahlst du mir nicht eine Geschichte? Ich will nicht. Okay. Ich habe keine Geschichten zu erzahlen. Du konntest mir eine Geschichte uber dich selbst erzahlen. Die Geschichten uber mich kennst du alle. Du warst dabei. Du hast Geschichten in deinem Inneren, von denen ich nichts weiss. Du meinst, so was wie Traume? Ja. Oder einfach Sachen, uber die du nachdenkst. Ja, aber Geschichten sollen doch schon sein. Nicht unbedingt. Du erzahlst immer schone Geschichten. Kennst du denn keine schonen? Meine haben mehr mit dem wirklichen Leben zu tun. Und meine nicht? Deine nicht. Nein. Der Mann betrachtete ihn. Und das wirkliche Leben ist ziemlich ubel? Was denkst du denn? Tja, ich denke, es gibt uns noch. Es sind viele schlimme Sachen passiert, aber es gibt uns immer noch. Ja. Du findest das nicht so toll. Es ist okay.
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storytelling
stories
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Cormac McCarthy |