“After all, it was only a story,' I said, determined to prove her wrong. 'All manner of terrible things may happen in a story. They may be startling at the time, but it passes. One gets caught up in the narrative, but the dangers aren't real, are they? Things happen in any way the storyteller chooses. It is all just made up.”

“I asked her what a true story was because I thought that all stories were made up. She said a true story was called fact, and a made-up story was called ficton. Auntie May said a made-up story is a bit like telling lies, only the people who read them knew that already and so it didn’t matter”

“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. ”

“in the story no one smiles,no lesson is learned.the narrator can not change any one's heartthe story is agate to another story,which opens onto a story after that. i made it up but the story is true.”

“You know, a lot of people would think that these stories that you're making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up.”

“When I am telling it, it doesn't seem as if it was only made up. It seems more real than you are -- more real than the schoolroom. I feel as if I were all the people in the story -- one after the other. It is queer.”