stories

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...

A well told story can be magic. Let me show you...

You should never turn down the offer of another man__ story,_ the fox persisted, moving off a little further into the trees ahead. __tories are the only thing that separates us from the animals after all.

Elephant wanted no part of Rupert Panther. Rather, he wanted Rupert Panther to have no part of him, which was a realistic concern because Rupert was looking at Elephant like a gambler coming off a marathon poker game in Las Vegas looks at the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet, like he has something to settle with a tall stack of pancakes, and he's all business and all fork.

True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

...someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings.

To my father, who told me the stories that matter. To my mother, who taught me to remember them.

We may just be specters in this world, but our stories, if they are remembered and retold, become real and solid and alive... Once you hear a story, it becomes part of you. It can't die.

People's lives take them strange places. They do strange things, and... well, sometimes they can't talk about them.

The first and last weakness of his life, before him again. For a moment he felt himself blinded by his own memories; his own remembrances of the wits and wiles of Marian Halcombe that would steal into his thoughts; the sound of her laughter at his outrageous tales, the shadowed glance of distrust, the way her eyebrows would raise ever so slightly despite her resolution to seem disinterested in his foreign insights. She was the first woman he ventured to have complete equality in matching his tremendous cleverness.

We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.

But it is always easy to put together stories about a past which nobody any longer remembers, like those about journeys to countries where nobody has ever been.

There__ no way to really preserve a person when they__e gone and that__ because whatever you write down it__ not the truth, it__ just a story. Stories are all we__e ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

I love words. _I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. _I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. _I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. _ In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.

What I know are simple truths. I know that the fabric of memory is reinforced by stories, rent by silences. I know that power dreads memory. I know that memory outlasts power's viciousness. I know . . . that a voiceless man is as good as dead.

It was one of the few stories we told the same way.

A chair can be more valuable in memories than, say, a precious gem. A gem could have no stories to share; no lives altered or changed in the slightest. It could remain buried beneath the earth for all we know and never have any memory to embody. A chair could transcend time and generations; from the people who sat in it and onlookers. It's all about considering what stories could be told if they had voices of their own.

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.