Why we need stories

"Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken -- and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created."

- Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders)

"She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams."

- Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

"I tell them: don���t depend on a woodsman in the third act. I tell them: look for sets of three, or seven. I tell them: there���s always a way to survive. I tell them: you can���t force fidelity. I tell them: don���t make bargains that involve major surgery. I tell them: you don���t have to lie still and wait for someone to tell you how to live. I tell them: it���s all right to push her into the oven. She was going to hurt you. I tell them: she couldn���t help it. She just loved her own children more. I tell them: everyone starts out young and brave. It���s what you do with it that matters. I tell them: you can share that bear with your sister. I tell them: no-one can stay silent forever. I tell them: it���s not your fault. I tell them: mirrors lie. I tell them: you can wear those boots, if you want them. You can lift that sword. It was always your sword. I tell them: the apple has two sides. I tell them: just because he woke you up doesn���t mean you owe him anything. I tell them: his name is Rumplestiltskin."

-  Catherynne M. Valente (The Bread We Eat in Dreams)

"We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.���  

- Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book)

The paintings above are Lisbeth Zwerger's illustrations for Little Red Cap, The Legend of Rosepetal, and The Seven Ravens.