“He unpacks his bag of taleswith fingers quickas a weaver's picking the weft threads threading the warp.Watch his fingers.Watch his lipsspeaking the old familiar words: "Once there was and there was not, oh, best beloved, when the world was filled with wishes the way the sea is filled with fishes..."All those threadspulling us backto another world, another time,when goosegirls married welland frogs could rhyme,when maids spoke syllables of pearland stepmothers came to grief..... (from The Storyteller poem)”

“He wishes to be far away, either at sea or on the shore. In between, he realizes, is the most difficult of all places to be.”

“Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.”

“...For it began to occur to him that one way to become private was to respect another's privacy.”

“And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are:Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth.”

“I must fill myself with sorrow if I am to give you what you want.”

“Folklore is the perfect second skin. From under its hide, we can see all the shimmering, shadowy uncertainties of the world.”