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If our relationships are made of many small lies, they become something larger, a prison of falsehoods.
“It’s a Maurice Sendak book,” Apollo said. “Where the Wild Things Are?” Julian asked. “That guy?” “That’s him. But this one isn’t as sweet. It’s called Outside Over There.”
History isn’t a tale told once, it’s a series of revisions.
Fairy tales are not for children. They didn’t used to be anyway. These were the stories peasants told to each other around the fire after a long day, not to their kids. This was how adults talked with each other. Fairy tales became stories for kids in the seventeen-hundreds. Around that time this weird new group started appearing in parts of Europe. The merchant class. “Merchants were making money, and they wanted to live better than the lower classes did. This meant there were new rules about how to behave, both for the adults and for the kids. Fairy tales changed accordingly. Now they had to
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Do you know how much harm ‘happily ever after’ has done to mankind? I wish they said something else at the end of those stories instead. ‘They tried to be happy.’ Or ‘Eternal happiness is a fruitless pursuit.’ What do you think?”
“Have you noticed that the stories about the first colonists in America are always about how they think the Devil is living out in the woods?”
Jotunn. Trolde. That’s how we say it in Norwegian.”
But reconciliation never came easy, not with the things that mattered.
The world is full of glamour, especially when it obscures the suffering of the weak.
What lengths will people stretch to believe they’re still good?
