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1 " There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud. "
― Gerald Hausman , The American Storybag
2 " There were good places and bad places to tell stories and there were of course stories that could not be told in any place on earth and these were reserved for heaven. "
3 " if everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world. If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the way up to now, and that's what the old storytellers have been telling us, including the Creek Indians who told this story along with every other tribe on earth. "
4 " Genuine bravery occurs when you least expect it, and when, in fact, you're quite oblivious of it. Sometimes heroism happens when you press on; other times when you let go. Once in a while, it happens when you do a little dance all your own. "
5 " And, in the end, I knew there was nothing better in life than keeping the head and the heart up—and when you cannot see the shoreline, always putting one hand, one word, in front of the other. "
6 " Mythology can be defined as the sacred history of humankind. This is different from what we call "history." Mythical stories, when you trace them back to their origin, often have a sacredness, a holy quality that comes from the bedrock of lore from which they emerged. "
7 " In reality, Hemingway didn't appeal to plumbers or roofers who read books; he was a rich man's writer, with the vocabulary and hunting instinct of the blue-collar workingman. But Hemingway had the unfailing genius of an inventor, and each book he wrote was new, sparkling new, something that hadn't been seen in American prose, something that merged common speech with uncommon clarity, something that verged on poetry. "
