“Once born into childlike faith, brimming with belief, typical people begin to lose their faith. Society mocks them. Their friends smirk. They come to change the world, but over time the world changes them. Soon they forget who they were; they forget the faith they once had. Then one day someone tells them the truth, but they don’t want to go back, because they’re comfortable in their new skin. Being a stranger in this world is never easy.”

“Faith. Blake had all the faith in the world in him. All these new, different people to protect were starting to scare him. How many fucking people will I have to beat the shit out of to keep them all happy and safe?”

“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.”

“Stories come alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth. Or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being. They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.”

“Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.”

“Does that change things?” asked the old man. “MaybeAnansi’s just some guy from a story, made up back in Africa inthe dawn days of the world by some boy with blackfly on his leg,pushing his crutch in the dirt, making up some goofy storyabout a man made of tar. Does that change anything? People respondto the stories. They tell them themselves. The storiesspread, and as people tell them, the stories change the tellers.Because now the folk who never had any thought in their headbut how to run from lions and keep far enough away from riversthat the crocodiles don’t get an easy meal, now they’re starting todream about a whole new place to live. The world may be thesame, but the wallpaper’s changed. Yes? People still have thesame story, the one where they get born and they do stuff andthey die, but now the story means something different to what itmeant before.”