Stories For Kids Quotes

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

Kids who don't eavesdrop on adult conversations are doomed to a childhood of ignorance.

If he wants to tell you, he'll tell you. End of story, Rose. Besides, you certainly keep your share of secrets too. You two have a lot in common." "Are you kidding? He's arrogant, sarcastic, likes to intimidate people, and—oh." Okay. Maybe she had a point.

(...) Since I was a kid." "Which you refer to as 'back when you were happy.'" "Right.

My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

Hazel blinked. “Two gods had a horse for a kid?” “Long story.

Once upon a time, each of us was somebody's kid. Everyone had a father, even if he never provided anything more than his seed. Everyone had a mother, even if she had to leave us on a stranger's doorstep. No matter how we're eventually raised, all of our stories begin the exact same way. They all end the same, too.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding. For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding. We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding. If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Gay kids aren’t a “plot point” that you can play with. Gay kids are real, actual kids, teenagers, growing up into awesome adults, and they don’t have the books they need to reflect that. Growing up, my nose was constantly stuck in a book. Growing up as a lesbian, I was told over and over and over by the lack of gayness in said books that I did not exist. That I wasn’t important enough to tell stories about. That I was invisible. Why are we telling our kids this? Why are we telling them that they’re a minority, and they don’t deserve the same rights as straights, that they’re going to grow up in a world that despises them, that the intolerance of humanity will never change, that they’re worthless. It’s not true.

Do you know how many times I've read "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" to this kid? That is one fucked-up story. How is that a book for babies?

A dog is a great thing for a kid to have. It's like a bicycle but with emotions.

The hood made me realise that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programmes and part-time jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn’t discriminate.

None of the other kids my age has to do all the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and bill paying. It’s just not fair that I have to be an adult when I’m still a kid.

She learned to read and speak by reading all of the books in her library.

The love stories sold us the wrong thing. The best kind of love doesn’t happen on moonlit walks and romantic vacations. It happens in between the folds of everyday life. It’s not grand gestures that show how you feel, it’s all the little secret things you do to make her life better that you never tell her about. Taking the end piece of the bread at breakfast so she can have the last middle piece for her sandwich when you pack her lunch. Making sure her car always has gas so she never has to stop at the pump. Telling her you’re not cold and to take your jacket when you are in fact, very, very cold. It’s watching TV on a rainy Sunday while you’re doing laundry and turning her light off when she’s fallen asleep reading. Sharing pizza crusts and laughing about something the kids did and taking care of each other when you’re sick. It isn’t glamorous, it isn’t all butterflies and stars in your eyes. It’s real. This is the kind of love that forever is made of. Because if it’s this good when life is draining and mundane and hard, think of how wonderful it will be when the love songs are playing and the moon is out.

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can't see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story.

We are all part of the same story, each of us different chapters. We may not have the power to choose setting or plot, but we can choose what kind of character we want to be.

I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college “adult” person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I’d become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that’s when life will really begin. And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin. I love movies about “The Big Moment” – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies. John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat. The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies. But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience.

If you are going to live in a house made of candy, don't move next door to a couple of obese kids. A lot of these fairy-tale characters are missing common sense.

The second thing you have to do to be a writer is to keep on writing. Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them. I meet far too many people who are going to be writers 'someday.' When they are out of high school, when they've finished college, after the wedding, when the kids are older, after I retire . . . That is such a trap You will never have any more free time than you do right now. So, whether you are 12 or 70, you should sit down today and start being a writer if that is what you want to do. You might have to write on a notebook while your kids are playing on the swings or write in your car on your coffee break. That's okay. I think we've all 'been there, done that.' It all starts with the writing.

Sometimes the most dangerous thing for kids is the silence that allows them to construct their own stories—stories that almost always cast them as alone and unworthy of love and belonging.

Whilst my mother couldn't give me access to the world, she at least made sure to let me know it existed. A kid cannot dream of being an astronaut if he does not know about space.

...she wasn't reading Deathly Hallows at all. Her book wasn't orange but rose and water and sand, and featured a kid on a broomstick and white unicorn. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. She didn't notice me staring at her. 'Oh, I envy you,' I thought, but was smiling for her. She had just begun.

Romeo and Juliet is synonymous with “romance” in our culture today. It is seen as the love story in English-speaking culture, an emotional ideal to live up to. Yet when you really get down to what happens in the story, these kids are absolutely out of their fucking minds. And they just killed themselves to prove it!

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.

You tell a kid he doesn't like to read, and he'll believe you

Do you like Moby Dick?" he asks. "I hate it," she says. "And I don't say that about many things. Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of 'quality.' But it's forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.

Kids believe in Santa; adults believe in childhood.

Dr. Barney stared at me, his lips puckered. What was he so serious about? Who hasn’t thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it?

I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said: “Here’s the deal, Wade. You’re something called a ‘human being.’ That’s a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we’re descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you’ll learn more about it But trust me, that’s really how we all got here. There’s proof of it everywhere, buried in the rocks. That story you heard? About how we were all created by a super-powerful dude named God who lives up in the sky? Total bullshit. The whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years. We made it all up. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. “Oh, and by the way … there’s no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. Also bullshit. Sorry, kid Deal with it.

Willa: You only live once, you know. This is a story you could tell your kids one day. Summer: What the fuck kind of stories do you plan on telling your children, Wils?

But I love you, and before you say it words do matter. They're not pointless. If they were pointless then they couldn't start revolutions and they wouldn't change history and they wouldn't be the things that you think about every night before you go to sleep. If they were just words we wouldn't listen to songs, we wouldn't beg to be read to when we're kids. If they were just words, then they'd have no meaning and stories wouldn't have been around since before humans could write. We wouldn't have learned to write. If they were just words then people wouldn't fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, stop aching because of them, have sex, quite a lot of the time, because of them.

How lovely. He’d forgotten how magical the Edwardses’ garden was, an oasis of green paths, flowering bushes, and jasmine-covered archways.

Cowards are nice, they're interesting, they're gentle, they wouldn't think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They're very brave.

First thing you learn wandering the long roads, kid. Everyone thinks they're the hero of their own story.

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.

I look at the field, and I think about the boy who just made the touchdown. I think that these are the glory days for that boy, and this moment will just be another story someday because all the people who make touchdowns and home runs will become somebody's dad. And when his children look at his yearbook photograph, they will think that their dad was rugged and handsome and looked a lot happier than they are. I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me.

I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know any kids besides my cousins. I wasn’t a lonely kid—I was good at being alone. I’d read books, play with the toy that I had, make up imaginary worlds. I lived inside my head. I still live inside my head. To this day you can leave me alone for hours and I’m perfectly happy entertaining myself. I have to remember to be with people.

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

I like Texas and Texans. In Texas, everything is bigger. When Texans win, they win big. And when they lose, it's spectacular. If you really want to learn the attitude of how to handle risk, losing and failure, go to San Antonio and visit the Alamo. The Alamo is a great story of brave people who chose to fight, knowing there was no hope of success against overwhelming odds. They chose to die instead of surrendering. It's an inspiring story worthy of study; nonetheless, it's still a tragic military defeat. They got their butts kicked. A failure if you will. They lost. So how do Texans handle failure? They still shout, "Remember the Alamo!" That's why I like Texans so much. They took a great failure and turned it into a tourist destination that makes them millions. Texans don't bury their failures. They get inspired by them. They take their failures and turn them into rallying cries. Failure inspires Texans to become winners. But that formula is not just the formula for Texans. It is formula for all winners.

Whenever I see news stories about children who were killed by their parents, I think: But how could it be? They cared enough to give this kid a name, they had a moment—at least one moment—when they sifted through all the possibilities and picked one specific name for their child, decided what they would call their baby. How could you kill something you cared enough to name?

I think I can communicate with kids because I don’t try to communicate with kids. Ninety percent of the children’s books patronize the child and say there’s a difference between you and me, so you listen to this story. I, for some reason or another, don’t do that. I treat the child as an equal.

There are millions of people out there who live this way, and their hearts are breaking just like mine. It’s okay to say, “My kid is a drug addict or alcoholic, and I still love them and I’m still proud of them.” Hold your head up and have a cappuccino. Take a trip. Hang your Christmas lights and hide colored eggs. Cry, laugh, then take a nap. And when we all get to the end of the road, I’m going to write a story that’s so happy it’s going to make your liver explode. It’s going to be a great day.

This was a few weeks ago," Annabeth said. "Percy told me a crazy story about meeting a boy our near Moriches Bay. Apparently this kid used hieroglyphs to cast spells. He helped Percy battle a crocodile monsters." "The Sob of Sobek!" Sadie blurted. "But my brother battled that monster. He didn't say anything about-" "Is your brother's name Carter?" Annabeth asked. An angry golden aura flickered around Sadie's head-a halo of hieroglyphs that resembled frowns, fists, and dead stick men. "As of this moment," Sadie growled, "My brother's name is Punching Bag.

Suicide is just a moment, Lexy told me. This is how she described it to me. For just a moment, it doesn't matter that you've got people who love you and the sun is shining and there's a movie coming out this weekend that you've been dying to see. It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself. You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it. I could just do it. And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you're going to make them see? And the moment's over. You think about how sad it would've been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would've taken care of her if you had gone. And you go back to normal. But you keep it there in your mind. Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose. You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your cheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same.... The day was hers to choose, and perhaps in that treetop moment when she looked down and saw the yard, the world, her life, spread out below her, perhaps she chose to plunge toward it headlong. Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air

GenerationS are Not Replacements. GenerationS are Reinforcements.

Youth are leaders TODAY, not just tomorrow!

Every time some [developer] says, ‘Nobody will go to the trouble of doing that,’ there’s some kid in Finland who will go to the trouble.

There’s a joke that I once heard a comedienne tell. It goes like this: “I’m not sure if I’m ready to have children. I asked a friend of mine who has children, ‘Suppose I do have kids. What if when they grow up, they blame me for everything that’s wrong with their lives?’ She laughed and said, ‘What do you mean, if?’ 

That's because Narnia was a Christian allegory pretending to be a fantasy series, you asshole," said one of the other boys. "C.S. Lewis never went through any doors. He didn't know how it worked. He wanted to tell a story, and he'd probably heard about kids like us, and he made shit up.

Aside from the fact that they say it's unhealthy, my fat ain't never been no trouble. Mens always have loved me. My kids ain't never complained. Plus they's fat.

Teach a child a useful skill. Build confidence and self-esteem that lasts a lifetime.

people used to tell me that i had beautiful hands told me so often, in fact, that one day i started to believe them until i asked my photographer father, “hey daddy could i be a hand model” to which he said no way, i dont remember the reason he gave me and i wouldve been upset, but there were far too many stuffed animals to hold too many homework assignment to write, too many boys to wave at too many years to grow, we used to have a game, my dad and i about holding hands cus we held hands everywhere, and every time either he or i would whisper a great big number to the other, pretending that we were keeping track of how many times we had held hands that we were sure, this one had to be 8 million 2 thousand 7 hundred and fifty three. hands learn more than minds do, hands learn how to hold other hands, how to grip pencils and mold poetry, how to tickle pianos and dribble a basketball, and grip the handles of a bicycle how to hold old people, and touch babies , i love hands like i love people, they're the maps and compasses in which we navigate our way through life, some people read palms to tell your future, but i read hands to tell your past, each scar marks the story worth telling, each calloused palm, each cracked knuckle is a missed punch or years in a factory, now ive seen middle eastern hands clenched in middle eastern fists pounding against each other like war drums, each country sees theyre fists as warriors and others as enemies. even if fists alone are only hands. but this is not about politics, no hands arent about politics, this is a poem about love, and fingers. fingers interlock like a beautiful zipper of prayer. one time i grabbed my dads hands so that our fingers interlocked perfectly but he changed positions, saying no that hand hold is for your mom. kids high five, but grown ups, we learn how to shake hands, you need a firm hand shake,but dont hold on too tight, but dont let go too soon, but dont hold down for too long, but hands are not about politics, when did it become so complicated. i always thought its simple. the other day my dad looked at my hands, as if seeing them for the first time, and with laughter behind his eye lids, with all the seriousness a man of his humor could muster, he said you know you got nice hands, you could’ve been a hand model, and before the laughter can escape me, i shake my head at him, and squeeze his hand, 8 million 2 thousand 7hundred and fifty four.

If the story had been about anyone else, it would been dismissed as laaf, that Afghan tendency to exaggerate ---sadly, almost a national affliction; if someone bragged that his son was a doctor, chances were the kid had once passed a biology test in high school.

I recognized it instantly. It was a made-up story, a fantasy, the tale of four kids who went through a magic wardrobe and found themselves in a strange new world. I'd read it more times than I could remember, and although I sneered at the thought of a magical land with friendly, talking animals, there were times when I wished, in my most secret moments, that I could find a hidden door that would take us allout of this place.

As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate.

Youth are leaders TODAY, not just tomorrow!

And when our kids grow up and ask about the story of Mummy and Daddy – how we met and how the Might Storm came to be – I’ll sit them down and tell them the story of how, once upon a long time ago, in Manchester, a girl moved next door to a boy.

One time I was standing on a corner in Chicago & a man stopped his car & asked for directions to a place I knew & I said that's too easy, ask me something harder & he yelled & said he wasn't playing games kid & then he drove off & I think about him sometimes & wonder if he ever got there.

The names of the kids with detention were announced at every assembly, and I was always one of them. Always. Every single day. It was a running joke. The prefect would say, ‘Detentions for today…’ and I would stand up automatically. It was like the Oscars and I was Meryl Streep.

Some women just aren’t cut out to be mothers, and unfortunately it had taken Susanna three kids to realize she was one of them.

If you BABYSIT the youths, you will get BABIES. If you LEAD the youths, you will have LEADERS!

Exercises in manual dexterity build self-esteem in children. Knowing how to tie shoe-strings, scarves and more into a bow is a useful and rewarding skill.

You can tie them, Yes you can. Just take those laces in both hands. Loop and swoop and tie them off. You can show them who’s the boss.

The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland. The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox. The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides. The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun. The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus. The moral of the story? Kids are smart.

Are you kidding me? We’re going to steal a cop car. How could I not be naked for this story? It’s going to be epic.

Do you really think he untied you? .. He was just checking his kids handiwork.

That is the moral of this story, kids. No matter how many people try to stomp on your happiness, you have the power to do whatever you want with your life.

The promise of a reward can help encourage children to keep at a hard task. Offer something fun each time the child takes time to practice.

Don’t give up. Let’s try again,” cheered on the bunny’s very best friend.

For at least twenty minutes she handed out the story. The youngest kids were soothed by her voice, and everyone else saw visions of the whistler running from the scene. Liesel did not. The book thief saw only the mechanics of the words--their bodies stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on. Somewhere, too, in the gaps between a period and the next capital letter, there was also Max. She remembered reading to him when he was sick. It he in the basement? she wondered. Or is he stealing a glimpse of the sky again?

A youth church is built by youths, for youths, to reach youths!

Don’t just think local or global, think generational. Think GenerationS!

Traditionally: Believe → Become → Belong This Generation: Belong → Believe → Become

I don’t need to know knots for the things I do. Why should I learn to tie my shoes?

Lacing and knotting is not just for shoes. Looping and tying are skills you can use.

I like big books and I cannot lie. You other readers can’t deny That when a kid walks in with The Name of the Wind Like a hardbound brick of win. Story bling. Wanna swipe that thing Cause you see that boy is speeding Right through the book he’s reading. I’m hooked and I can’t stop pleading. Wanna curl up with that for ages, All thousand pages. Reviewers tried to warn me. But with that plot you hooked Me like Bradley. Ooh, crack that fat spine. You know I wanna make you mine. This book is stella ’cause it ain’t some quick novella.

I realized that my determination to make things perfect meant I was chasing an empty obsession all day long. Nothing was ever going to be perfect the way I had envisioned it in the past. Did I want to keep spending my energy on that effort, or did I want to step out of that obsession and to enjoy my kids, maybe allowing myself to get messy right along with them in the process? I chose the latter - and that made all the difference.

Don’t just invite youths to the party, give them a seat at the table.

Empower the youths, Don’t Entertain them!

Going beyond “Every nation in my generation” to “Every Generation in my nation

Strong GenerationS Churches do not fight tomorrow’s war with yesterday’s strategies.

Think of that person you knew when you were a kid, who you always thought you could have loved completely and forever.Well, you could have. It’s the truth, and it’s the saddest and simplest thing. There isn’t just one person for each of us in the world. There aren’t many, but there are always a few people we could have made it with, that maybe we still want to make it with, that press themselves so close to our hearts they leave scars, and then slip through our fingers and disappear from our lives. And it doesn’t make a difference if you’re thirteen or ninety- eight because some things you feel are real, no matter when.

If you don’t captivate youths now for Christ, something else will come in to carry them captive!

Don’t just invite youths to the party, give them a seat at the table.

Don’t use people to build the church. Use the church to build people.

Don’t use people to build the church. Use the church to build people.

Do the Important, Not the Impressive.

From your generation onwards, it will be different.

Fathers don’t just reproduce sons. Fathers reproduce fathers.

The young generation is not here to push you OUT but to push you UP!

GenerationS is not just reaching My Generation or even the Next Generation. But it is reaching many GenerationS.

GenerationS is having layers and layers of leaders at the same time.

Be a Kingmaker, Not Just a King.

Instead of laying a red carpet for yourself to walk on, lay a bridge and let the young people walk over to you.

There are Miracles in the Mundane, Beauty in the Banal and Riches in the Routine!

Our next generation leaders should walk in our footsteps, not in our shadow.

Youths need to be invited, included, involved, before they can be influenced and impacted.

Moving from “I belong to HOGC” to “HOGC belongs to me

HOGC is the place where friends become family and family become friends.

Church is not ‘Where’ but ‘Who’. Church is not about the Place but the People. Church is our HOME. Church is about the People & Relationships.

Empowered Youths become Producers. Entertained Youths become Consumers.

The Key to Paradise was for poor people. Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with their keys around their necks.

Well, good afternoon, sunshine. How are you feeling?" "Like something the cat dragged in, then dragged back outside to leave in the rain, and mud, then the lightning hit it, and burned it, and the cat came back to tear it into pieces, before burying it.

Wiggin really doesn't care as much about himself as he does about these other kids who aren't worth five minutes of his time. And yet this may be the very trait that makes everyone focus on him. Maybe this is why all those stories Sister Carlotta told him, Jesus always had a crowd around him.Maybe this is why I'm so afraid of Wiggen. Because he's the alien, not me. He's the unintelligible one, the unpredictable one. He's the one who doesn't do things for sensible, predictable reasons. I'm going to survive, and once you know that, there's nothing more to know about me. Him, though, he could do anything.

We’re not people,” he said. “We’re the stories that people tell each other about us. Belters are crazy terrorists. Earthers are lazy gluttons. Martians are cogs in a great big machine.” “Men are fighters,” Naomi said, and then, her voice growing bleak. “Women are nurturing and sweet and they stay home with the kids. It’s always been like that. We always react to the stories about people, not who they really are.” “And look where it got us,” Holden said.

I wasn’t a lonely kid—I was good at being alone. I’d read books, play with the toy that I had, make up imaginary worlds. I lived inside my head. I still live inside my head. To this day you can leave me alone for hours and I’m perfectly happy entertaining myself. I have to remember to be with people.

Still. Four words. And I didn’t realize it until a couple of days ago, when someone wrote in to my blog: Dear Neil, If you could choose a quote - either by you or another author - to be inscribed on the wall of a public library children’s area, what would it be? Thanks! Lynn I pondered a bit. I’d said a lot about books and kids’ reading over the years, and other people had said things pithier and wiser than I ever could. And then it hit me, and this is what I wrote: I’m not sure I’d put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I’d just remind people of the power of stories, and why they exist in the first place. I’d put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it’s working, and that pages will be turned: “… and then w

Once youths are awakened by Christ, they will be ‘woke’ to the cause of Christ.

Home is not ‘WHERE’ but ‘WHO’.

If you want a child to know the truth, tell him the truth. If you want a child to love the truth, tell him a story.

When you’re a kid, they tell you stories of monsters hiding under your bed or in the dark. They don’t tell you of the very real human ones. Those who prey on people weaker than them, or even the monsters that hide within ourselves.

I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, "Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy alcohol." To which I always respond, "I guess that means you keep heroin in your liquor cabinet?

That’s how people live, by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? “Tell me a story.” That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.

Did you know that when we were kids Cass used to tell me your stories? She used to laugh at you. Not in a mean way, but in the way that Cass used to laugh at everything before...." He gestures around us at our world now. I shake my head. "I thought Cass never liked my stories. Never remembered them." "Oh yes, I would beg her to tell me if she had new stories from you." "Why didn't you ask me yourself?" I whisper. "Because you were Harry's," he responds. "Not always." "Yes, always," he says. "Always in his eyes," he adds in a softer tone.

Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.

I always kinda liked our attic ghost. When I was a kid, I used to go up there and read stories to it. Show it my new toys. It's just an old spirit stuck between the worlds, right? What's to be scared of?"" ~Vic

My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid—not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered. We

To have a different life you have be a different person. You have to do what you haven't done. You have to become the person that fits that dream. But most of all, you have to realize that if you don't step into your story it becomes the moral of the story. Your inaction is a lesson you leave to your kids-- I was too afraid to change.

No. You can’t understand. Because you’re reading the last chapter of something without having read the first chapter. You’re a little guy, Bode. Kids always think they’re coming into a story at the beginning, when they’re usually coming in at the end.

Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I’d known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we’re always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we’re doing things we technically don’t know how to do.

When I was 13 years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas, to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life; it gave me the hope that one day I could live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married. Most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he'd want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by their churches, or by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value. And that no matter what everyone tells you, God does love you, and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours.

In 2012, in the United Kingdom, the number of people (regardless of race) shot and killed by police officers: 1 In 2013, in the United Kingdom, the number of times police officers fired guns in the line of duty/the number of people fatally shot: 3/0 In the United States, in the seven year period ending in 2012, a white police officer killed a black person nearly two times a week. “I’m not much of a talker,” she finished up. “You know that. But I know numbers. The numbers don’t lie, kids. The numbers always tell a story.

The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets - loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block - all of it whispered painful truths.

People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.

The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid.

He held my hand and told me a story about when he was six and threw a rock at a kid's head who was bullying his brother, and how after that no one had bothered either of them again. 'You have to stick up for yourself,' he told me. 'But it's bad to throw rocks,' I said. 'I know. You're smarter than me. You'll find something better than rocks.

i wrote the story of charlie davis for the cutters and the burners and the kids on the street that have no where safe to sleep. i wrote the story of charlie davis for their mothers and fathers and for their friends.

But my brain winds and wends. Back and forth. Up and down. It feels like the county fair has inhabited my mind-- complete with sketchy rides, carnies, and sugar-amped kids crying over lost balloons. So loud and disorienting. I want it to pack up and move on to the next town. I want my mind to be an open grassy field again with crickets and dandelions.

He lifted his brows. "If I really thought it was the absolute best thing for our kids, you'd have had a battle on your hands. That was just a debate." "With chair-throwing." "Heated debate. Fights involve chair-breaking. Chair-throwing is just getting your attention.

And he’d figured out that the fun was often not the thing itself—the party, the keg stand, the naked running into the duck pond—but the endless talking about it after, the reliving and describing, and laughing about it in front of people who wished they’d been there. Used to be he was one of the kids listening, one of the kids who missed everything, but now, since college, since Kate, he was in the stories.

I write for the kid in me. . . . Often when I’m working on a story, I’ll find myself laughing at something my characters have done, or even being surprised at where they’ve taken the story. It’s as if they have a life all their own. What I do is create them and then let them go on to entertain me. . . .

Sometimes I still stare into space and think about Cameron. I think about how there are certain people who come into your life and leave a mark. I don't mean the usual faint impression: He was cute, she was nice, they made me laugh, I wish I'd known her better, I remember the time she threw up in class. And I don't just mean they change you. A lot of people can change you - the first kid who called you a name, the first teacher who said you were smart, the first person who crowned you their best friend. It's the change you remember, the firsts and what they meant, not really the people.

The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives—their avatars—on the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the “issue” books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own. And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, “Sorry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different.” You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star.

Words matter, in fact. They're not pointless, as you've suggested. If they were pointless, then they couldn't start revolutions and they wouldn't change history. If they were just words, we wouldn't write songs or listen to them. We wouldn't beg to be read to as kids. If they were just words, then stories wouldn't have been around since before we could write. We wouldn't have learned to write. If they were just words, people wouldn't fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, and stop aching because of them." (p. 210) (Henry Jones)

The kids in the League knew about the camps-vaguely. There were only a few of us who had actually lived in one and experienced the life firsthand, but there was an unspoken rule we didn't talk about it. Everyone knew the truth, but the truth didn't live inside them the same way it did for us. They'd heard about the sorting machines, the cabins, the testing, but most of their stories were gossip, completely wrong. These kids had never stood for hours on end in an assembly lime. They didn't know fear came in the shape of a small black camera lens, an eye that followed you everywhere at all times.

I met this boy here who I knew as a kid and his mum left him with a pedophile for two weeks when he was eight years old and I'm presuming you know everything there is to know about Jonah's father, and that my father is dead, and my mother hasn't been around for years, and God knows Jessa's real story. So what I'm saying here, Sergeant, is that we're just a tad low on the reliable adult quota so you have no right to be all self-righteous about what Chaz did and if you're going to go around not talking to him when his only crime was wanting me to have what he has, then I think you're going to turn out to be a bit of a dud and you know something? I'm just a bit over life's little disappointments right now. Do you understand what I'm saying?

Write it. Just write it. Write it on receipts in the car while you wait for your kid to finish their piano lessons, scribble on napkins at lunch with friends. Type on crappy typewriters or borrow computers if you have to. Fill notebooks with ink. Write inside your head while you’re in traffic and when you’re sitting in the doctor’s office. Write the truth, write lies. Write the perfect spouse. Write your dreams. Write your nightmares. Write while you cry about what you’re writing, write while you laugh out loud at your own words. Write until your fingers hurt, then keep writing more. Don’t ever stop writing. Don’t ever give up on your story, no matter what “they” say. Don’t ever let anybody take away your voice. You have something to say, your soul has a story to tell. Write it. There is never any reason to be afraid. Just write it and then put it out there for the world. Shove it up a flag pole and see who salutes it. Somebody will say it’s crap. So what? Somebody else will love it. And that’s what writing’s about. Love. Love of the art, love of the story, and love for and from the people who really understand your work. Nobody else matters. Love yourself. Love your work. Be brave. Just write.

I think most kids have a place they go to when they're scared or lonely or just plain bored. They call it NeverLand or The Shire, Boo'ya Moon if they've got big imaginations and make it up for themselves. Most of them forget. The talented few - like Scott - harness their dreams and turn them into horses.

To encapsulate the notion of Mardi Gras as nothing more than a big drunk is to take the simple and stupid way out, and I, for one, am getting tired of staying stuck on simple and stupid. Mardi Gras is not a parade. Mardi Gras is not girls flashing on French Quarter balconies. Mardi Gras is not an alcoholic binge. Mardi Gras is bars and restaurants changing out all the CD's in their jukeboxes to Professor Longhair and the Neville Brothers, and it is annual front-porch crawfish boils hours before the parades so your stomach and attitude reach a state of grace, and it is returning to the same street corner, year after year, and standing next to the same people, year after year--people whose names you may or may not even know but you've watched their kids grow up in this public tableau and when they're not there, you wonder: Where are those guys this year? It is dressing your dog in a stupid costume and cheering when the marching bands go crazy and clapping and saluting the military bands when they crisply snap to. Now that part, more than ever. It's mad piano professors converging on our city from all over the world and banging the 88's until dawn and laughing at the hairy-shouldered men in dresses too tight and stalking the Indians under Claiborne overpass and thrilling the years you find them and lamenting the years you don't and promising yourself you will next year. It's wearing frightful color combination in public and rolling your eyes at the guy in your office who--like clockwork, year after year--denies that he got the baby in the king cake and now someone else has to pony up the ten bucks for the next one. Mardi Gras is the love of life. It is the harmonic convergence of our food, our music, our creativity, our eccentricity, our neighborhoods, and our joy of living. All at once.

In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls.

I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling --just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is...a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm...It's me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose.

Stories help you understand your life, she’d say. Stories can heal. And I think she’s right, because why do old guys back from the war tell their experiences again and again? Why did people of long ago make up elaborate tales of mythical beings? Why do people sit in a room and reveal the pieces of their life to doctors trained to listen, and why are they cured by doing that? Why libraries? Come on, all those stories, pieces of life told again and again. We need them. Stories are a ritual that put all the crazy shit about life into a form that makes sense. We’re all like the little kids that need to be read the same story over and over again.

Gee, I’m really glad I came.” Jess turned to Leslie in unbelief. “It was better than a movie.” “You’re kidding.” “No, I’m not.” And she wasn’t. He could tell by her face. “That whole Jesus thing is really interesting, isn’t it?” “What d’you mean?” “All those people wanting to kill him when he hadn’t done anything to hurt them.” She hesitated. “It’s really kind of a beautiful story—like Abraham Lincoln or Socrates—or Aslan.

Do you have any idea how many times I’ve read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to this kid? That is one fucked-up story. How is that a book for babies?” Jase laughs. “I thought it was about babysitting.” “Hell no, it’s addiction. That friggin’ mouse is never satisfied. You give him one thing, he wants something else, and then he asks for more and on and on and on. Fucked up.

No, I’ve heard of it,” he corrects me. “As a kid, I never read for fun. I’m dyslexic, and it took too long.” “What about audiobooks?” I say. “Does that count?” he asks. “Of course it counts,” I say. His eyes narrow. “Are you sure?” “I’m a librarian,” I say. “If anyone gets to decide whether it counts or not, it’s me.

You know the story in the Bible?', Jacob asked suddenly, still reading the blank ceiling. 'The one with the king and the two women fighting over the baby?' 'Sure. King Solomon.' 'That's right. King Solomon.' he repeated. 'And he said, cut the kid in half... but it was only a test. Just to see who would give-up their share to protect it.' 'Yeah. I remember.' He looked back at my face. 'I'm not going to cut you in half anymore, Bella.

Here's the thing. I hate kids. Always have. I mean, I know the job of the race, biologically speaking, is to achieve immortality through reproduction, but the idea of getting impregnated and blowing up like a balloon as I serve as a carrier and service unit for this other person who will eventually burst out of me in the most terrifying way imaginable, then carry on using me one way or another for the rest of my life, is right up there with throwing myself off the top of a twenty-story building. If I have a biological clock, it is digital and does not tick.

We fiction writers have a responsibility when creating a character; he or she must sit beside us as we read the story. If she isn’t, we haven’t done our job. Therefore, writing Dr. T’s character forced a plunge into places I had no interest in going. A person like Adam Turner would not have come into this beautiful world looking for a kid to control, manipulate, or wreck. There had to be a reason- that created massive psychic wounds.

Now there’s no good way to get out of it. I mean, when we ‘break up,’ Peter will get to feel smug and superior about that.” “That’s no problem,” Miles says, pouring a taste of white wine for each of us. “All we have to do is get married, and then stay together until they split up. And if they have kids, just have one more than them. If they get a dog, we get a cuter dog. If they buy a new house, we get a mansion.” “A perfect plan,” I say. “Why didn’t I think of it?

When the subject of kids first came up years ago, I'd joked that the only thing I could imagine worse than me as a mother was Clay as a father. I couldn't have been more wrong. Clay was an amazing parents. The guy who couldn't spare a few minutes to hear a mutt's side of the story could listen to his kids talk all day. The guy who couldn't sit still through a brief council meeting could spend hours building Lego castles with his kids. The guy who solved problems with his fists never even raised his voice to his children. And if sometimes Clay was a little too indulgent, a little too slow to discipline, preferring to leave that to me, I was okay with it. He supported and enforced my decisions and we presented a unified front to our children, and that was all that mattered.

Christmas is supposed to be this time when everyone is nice to one another and forgives one another and all that, but the true meaning of Christmas is presents. And in the real world, Santa’s not fair. Rich kids get everything and poor kids get secondhand crap their parents bust their asses to afford. It costs money just to sit on Santa’s lap.

My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.

When I was a little girl,' I said, sitting down, 'the wallpaper in my room had pictures of Noah's story.' [...] You know what's weird though? It's weird that the ark would be such a kids' story, you know? I mean, it's...really a story about death. Every person who isn't in Noah's family? They die. Every animal, apart from two of each on the boat? They die. They all die in the flood. Billions of creatures. It's the worst tragedy ever,' I finished, my voice tied off by a knot in my chest.[...] 'What the hell,'I said, 'pardon my language, was that doing on my wallpaper?

I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. I’d have them keep a journal and have them freewrite after they read each assignment. What did this make you think about? That’s what I’d want to know. I think you could get some really original ideas that way, not the old regurgitated ones like man versus nature. Just shoot me if I ever assign anyone an essay about man versus nature. Questions like that are designed to pull you completely out of the story. Why would you want to pull kids out of the story? You want to push them further in, so they can feel everything the author tried so hard to create for them.

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea. They talk about their “morning ritual” and how they “dress for writing” and the cabin in Big Sur where they go to “be alone”—blah blah blah. No one tells the truth about writing a book. Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver. I wrote this book after my kids went to sleep. I wrote this book on subways and on airplanes and in between setups while I shot a television show. I wrote this book from scribbled thoughts I kept in the Notes app on my iPhone and conversations I had with myself in my own head before I went to sleep. I wrote it ugly and in pieces.

Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theatre or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn't as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn't ever men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies and in life too, it's going on all the time, all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It's both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter.

Of all the places I have walked into, libraries must be the most magical. Have you ever opened the cover of a book and wondered what you would find inside? Where you would go? Whom you would meet? A story has the power to send you back in time or into the future, to transport you to other lands and kingdoms. I’ve met ogres, talking rabbits, and some of my best friends in the pages of books. Librarians might just have the best jobs ever. With each library card they hand out, they offer a ticket to strange and marvelous worlds. Open a book and, like Reading Beauty, you might fall under a spell—the magic of a deep read. But chances are, unlike the Sleeping Beauty of the original fairy tale, you will never want the spell to be broken.

Now, kids…wine is alcohol. That’s a drink for grown-ups. Gee, Mr. Percy Jackson, you say, can’t we have some wine? No, no, kids. Wine is dangerous. I don’t want any of you to drink alcohol until you’re at least thirty-five years old. Even then, you should get a doctor’s note and your parents’ permission, drink responsibly (like one swig a month), and never operate heavy machinery while under the influence! Okay…I think that covers my legal bases. On with the story.

Kamala: You're WOLVERINE! My Wolverine-and-Storm-in-space fanfic was the third-most upvoted story on Freaking Awesome last month! Logan: Oh my God. Kamala: I had you guys fighting this giant alien blob that farts wormholes! Logan: Sounds great, kid. [pause] Logan: Wait--so what was the MOST upvoted story? Kamala: Umm...Cyclops and Emma Frost's romantic vacation in Paris? Logan: This is the worst day of my life.

That's my school. I worked harder to get in than I did for anything else, ever. I went there because, coming out of it, I'd be able to be President. Or a lawyer. Rich, that's the point. Rich and successful. And look where it got me. One stupid year and here I am with not one, but two bracelets on my wrist, next to a shrink in a room adjacent to a hall where there's a guy named Human Being walking around. If I keep doing this for three more years, where will I be? I'll be a complete loser. And what If I keep on? What if I do okay, live with the depression, get into College, do College, go to Grad School, get the Job, get the Money, get Kids and a Wife and a Nice Car? What kind of crap will I be in then? I'll be completely crazy.

These kids, her multitudes, they could grow up. They could move Away. They could—they would—become new, become changed, become actual adult people in progress, people she wouldn’t recognize, people she could not imagine. People remade. They would undergo miracles. They would transform. They would make magic. But they were her story, hers and Penn’s, so however wide they wandered, they would always be right here.

[E]ducation is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible. This is particularly true of elementary and secondary education, of course…. I began to remember what it had been like: the tremendous excitement of the first couple of years, when kids imagine that great secrets are going to be unfolding before them, then the disappointment that gradually sets in when you begin to realize the truth: There’s plenty of learning to do, but it’s not the learning you wanted. It’s learning to keep your mouth shut, learning how to avoid attracting the teacher’s attention when you don’t want it, learning not to ask questions, learning how to pretend to understand, learning how to tell teachers what they want to hear, learning to keep your own ideas and opinions to yourself, learning how to look as if you’re paying attention, learning how to endure the endless boredom.

I'm also old... and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I'm not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever had for me was horses and horseback riding, but I've also been cooking and going for long walks since I was a kid (yes, the two are related), and I'm getting even more three dimensionally biased as I get older — gardening, bell ringing... piano playing... And the stories I seem to need to write seem to need that kind of nourishment from me — how you feed your story telling varies from writer to writer. My story-telling faculty needs real-world fresh air and experiences that create calluses (and sometimes bruises).

Some of us are born rebellious. Reading the story of Zelda Fitzgerald by Nancy Milford, I identified with her mutinous spirit. I remember passing shopwindows with my mother and asking why people didn’t just kick them in. She explained that there were unspoken rules of social behavior, and that’s the way we coexist as people. I felt instantly confined by the notion that we are born into a world where everything was mapped out by those before us. I struggled to suppress destructive impulses and worked instead on creative ones. Still, the small rule-hating self within me did not die.

that’s how I’ve come to picture Mom at the end: reaching as hard as her little body would stretch, trying to touch the blue sky, reaching for some peace. And getting it. If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid in his overly tight church clothes and Darkhawk attitude, and tell him: You think you’re giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you.

If/when I die, do not want Pam lonely. Want her to remarry, have full life. As long as new husband is nice guy. Gentle guy. Religious guy. Very caring + good to kids. But kids not fooled. Kids prefer dead dad (i.e., me) to religious guy. Pale, boring, religious guy, with no oomph, who wears weird sweaters and is always a little sad, due to, cannot get boner, due to physical ailment. Ha ha. Death very much on my mind tonight, future reader. Can it be true? That I will die? That Pam, kids will die? Is awful. Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like. Note to self: try harder, in all things, to be better person.

Now The Head Lines How do you like your truth? Gently spoken on breakfast TV By a man and a woman who sit comfortably Saying riots, and murder, when will it end? As they struggle to act as if they are good friends. How do you like your truth? Bite-sized in sound bites cut easy to chew, With a talking head saying the victim's like you And when you've digested the horrors you've seen You find good, you find evil, and no in-between. How do you like your truth? Fantastic, sensational, printed in bold, Today it's exclusive, tomorrow it's old, All on the surface with nothin too deep With a story about animals to help you to sleep How do you like your youth? From perfect families with parents thet care, Or in perfect families but still in despair, Ten out of ten parents say they'd not choose To have bad kids like those in the news.

We're humans, not machines. We have bad days. We have mental difficulties. We are inspired, yet we fail. We are not linear. We have hearts that break and souls we don't know what to do with. We kill and destroy but we build and make possible too. We've been to the moon and invented computers. We outsource most things but we still have to live with ourselves. We're pessimists who believe it's too late so what the hell? We're the comeback kids in love with second chances. And every New Year is another chance.

Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them.

But you may feel differently. Maybe you’re one of those church members who get annoyed by the noise that comes with children or you get offended by the stains they leave behind in a perfectly clean church. If that’s you, I hope you’ll have the courage to reconsider. To start, maybe you’ll go to one of those marks on the wall or the stain on the brand-new carpeting and ask yourself this question: did Jesus die to save the carpet you’re standing on or the kid who made the stain?

When she was little, someone gave her some weird book called The Wife Store. It was about a very lonely man who decided that he wanted to get married. So he went to the wife store, where endless women lined enormous shelves. He picked himself a wife and bought her. She was bagged up and put in a cart. He took her home. After that, the two of them went to the children store to buy a few kids. Petey read this book over and over. Not because she liked it, but because she kept waiting for the story to change, kept waiting for the day she'd turn the page and a woman would get to the husband store. She kept waiting for justice. But, of course, the story never changed. She never got justice. If Petey were keeping one of her lists of the things she hated, she wold have to add: the fact that there was no justice. But The Wife Store was still on her shelf at home, if only to remind her that there were assholes in the world who would write such things, believe such things.

And dieting, I discovered, was another form of disordered eating, just as anorexia and bulimia similarly disrupt the natural order of eating. "Ordered" eating is the practice of eating when you are hungry and ceasing to eat when your brain sends the signal that your stomach is full. ... All people who live their lives on a diet are suffering. If you can accept your natural body weight and not force it to beneath your body's natural, healthy weight, then you can live your life free of dieting, of restriction, of feeling guilty every time you eat a slice of your kid's birthday cake.

You could have mentioned that this kid never sleeps,” Tim calls from the living room. We go in to find him slumped in the easy chair next to the pulled-out sofa bed. Andy’s sprawled out on the bed, long tan legs in a V, George gathered in her arms. Duff, still in his clothes, lies across the bottom, Harry curled in a ball on the pillow under Andy’s outstretched leg. Safety, as much as could be found, must have lain in numbers.Patsy’s fingering Tim’s nose and pulling on his bottom lip, her eyes wide-blue open. “Sorry, man,” Jase says. “She’s usually good to go at bedtime.” “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to this kid? That is one fucked-up story. How is that a book for babies?” Jase laughs. “I thought it was about babysitting.” “Hell no, it’s addiction. That friggin’ mouse is never satisfied. You give him one thing, he wants something else, and then he asks for more and on and on and on. Fucked up. Patsy liked it, though. Fifty thousand times.” Tim yawns, and Patsy snuggles more comfortably onto his chest, grabbing a handful of shirt. “So what’s doin’?” We tell him what we know—nothing—then put the baby in her crib. She glowers, angry and bewildered for a moment, then grabs her five pacifiers, closes her eyes with a look of fierce concentration, and falls very deeply asleep.

Because,” Conner explained with a smirk on his face, “if you’re going to live in a house made of candy, don’t move next door to a couple of obese kids. A lot of these fairy-tale characters are missing common sense.” Alex let out another disapproving grunt. Conner figured he could get at least fifty more out of her before they got home. “The witch didn’t live next door! She lived deep in the forest! They had to leave a trail of bread crumbs behind so they could find their way back, remember. And the whole point of the house was to lure the kids in. They were starving!” Alex reminded him. “At least have all the facts straight before you criticize.” “If they were starving, what were they doing wasting bread crumbs?” Conner asked. “Sounds like a couple of troublemakers to me.” Alex grunted again. “And

Who hasn't thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it? It's an option taken by a lot of successful people: Ernest Hemingway, Socrates, Jesus. Even before high school, I thought that it would be a cool thing to do if I ever got really famous. If I kept making my maps, for instance, and some art collector came across them and decided to make them worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if I killed myself at the height of that, they'd be worth millions of dollars, and I wouldn't be responsible for them anymore. I'd have left behind something that spoke for itself.

Where does a woman go in a society where that is the norm? When the police won’t help her? When her own family won’t help her? Where does a woman go when she leaves one man who hits her and is just as likely to wind up with another man who hits her, maybe even worse than the first? Where does a woman go when she’s single with three kids and she lives in a society that makes her a pariah for being a manless woman? Where she’s seen as a whore for doing that? Where does she go? What does she do? But I didn’t comprehend any of that at the time.

In Germany, no child finishes high school without learning about the Holocaust. Not just the facts of it but the how and the why and the gravity of it—what it means. As a result, Germans grow up appropriately aware and apologetic. British schools treat colonialism the same way, to an extent. Their children are taught the history of the Empire with a kind of disclaimer hanging over the whole thing. “Well, that was shameful, now wasn’t it?” In South Africa, the atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren’t taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it’s taught in America. In America, the history of racism is taught like this: “There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it’s done.” It was the same for us. “Apartheid was bad. Nelson Mandela was freed. Let’s move on.” Facts, but not many, and never the emotional or moral dimension. It was as if the teachers, many of whom were white, had been given a mandate. “Whatever you do, don’t make the kids angry.

I’m kind of hoping it will end like this. You made me happy. Very happy. But…you deserve everything. Wife, kids, a white picket fence.” “And I’ll have all of it. With you.” “You know that can’t happen with me.” “Then it can’t happen with anyone. There won’t be a next Rosie. And there won’t be another story like ours. This is it, Rose LeBlanc. And this is us. If there is no you, then there is no me.” “You know, I always hated Romeo and Juliet . The play. The movie. The very idea. It was tragic, all right. Tragically stupid. I mean, they were what? Thirteen? Sixteen? What a waste of life, to kill yourself because your family wouldn’t let you get hitched. But Romeo and Juliet were right. I was the next eleven years killing myself slowly while I grieved for you. Then you came back, and I still thought it was just a fascination. But now that I know…” “Now that I know that it can only ever be you, you’re going to get better for me so Earth won’t explode. Can you do that, Sirius? I promise not to leave this room until you get out. Not even for a shower. Not even to get you your chocolate chip cookies. I’ll get someone to drive all the way to New York and bring them for you.” “I love you.” Rosie’s tears curtained her vision. “I love you, Baby LeBlanc,” I said. “So fucking much. You taught me how to love. How well did I do?” “A-plus,” she whispered. “You aced it. Can you promise me something?” “Anything.” “ Live .” “Not without you.” “And have kids. Lots of them. They’re fun.” “Rosie…” “I’m not afraid. I got what I wanted from this life. You .” “Rosie.” “I love you, Earth. You were good to me.” “Rose!” Her eyes closed, the door opened, the sound on her monitor went off, and my heart disintegrated. Piece. By piece. By piece.

Tentacles is my term — the Tentacles are the evil tasks that invade my life. Like, for example, my American History class last week, which necessitated me writing a paper on the weapons of the Revolutionary war, which necessitated me traveling to the Metropolitan Museum to check out some of the old guns, which necessitated me getting the subway, which necessitated me being away from my cell phone and email for 45 minutes, which meant that I didn’t get to respond to a mass mail sent out by my teacher asking who needed extra credit, which meant other kids snapped up the extra credit, which meant I wasn’t going to get a 98 in the class, which meant I wasn’t anywhere close to a 98.6 average (body temperature, that’s what you needed to get), which meant I wasn’t going to get into a Good College, which meant I wasn’t going to have a Good Job, which meant I wasn’t going to have health insurance, which meant I’d have to pay tremendous amounts of money for the shrinks and drugs my brain needed, which meant I wasn’t going to have enough money to pay for a Good Lifestyle, which meant I’d feel ashamed, which meant I’d get depressed, and that was the big one because I knew what that did to me: it made it so I wouldn’t get out of bed, which led to the ultimate thing — homelessness. If you can’t get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground., to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

And each year, more gunters called it quits, concluding that Halliday had indeed made the egg impossible to find. And another year went by. And another. Then, on the evening of February 11, 2045, an avatar’s name appeared at the top of the Scoreboard, for the whole world to see. After five long years, the Copper Key had finally been found, by an eighteen-year-old kid living in a trailer park on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. That kid was me. Dozens of books, cartoons, movies, and miniseries have attempted to tell the story of everything that happened next, but every single one of them got it wrong. So I want to set the record straight, once and for all.

Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot. "See that purple Harley out there—that big gorgeous one? That's mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn't have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attach and totaling us both. I even put 'Ms.' on my license plate—and you should see my grandkids' faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!" On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I've walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear. What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up. I tell you this story because it's the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I've come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle. We have only to discover it—and ride.

I especially loved the Old Testament. Even as a kid I had a sense of it being slightly illicit. As though someone had slipped an R-rated action movie into a pile of Disney DVDs. For starters Adam and Eve were naked on the first page. I was fascinated by Eve's ability to always stand in the Garden of Eden so that a tree branch or leaf was covering her private areas like some kind of organic bakini. But it was the Bible's murder and mayhem that really got my attention. When I started reading the real Bible I spent most of my time in Genesis Exodus 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. Talk about violent. Cain killed Abel. The Egyptians fed babies to alligators. Moses killed an Egyptian. God killed thousands of Egyptians in the Red Sea. David killed Goliath and won a girl by bringing a bag of two hundred Philistine foreskins to his future father-in-law. I couldn't believe that Mom was so happy about my spending time each morning reading about gruesome battles prostitutes fratricide murder and adultery. What a way to have a "quiet time." While I grew up with a fairly solid grasp of Bible stories I didn't have a clear idea of how the Bible fit together or what it was all about. I certainly didn't understand how the exciting stories of the Old Testament connected to the rather less-exciting New Testament and the story of Jesus. This concept of the Bible as a bunch of disconnected stories sprinkled with wise advice and capped off with the inspirational life of Jesus seems fairly common among Christians. That is so unfortunate because to see the Bible as one book with one author and all about one main character is to see it in its breathtaking beauty.

Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn’t trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he’d been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill. I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class... “Stories aren’t real,” he told me shortly. “They don’t feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding ‘family’ in the nearest gang.” Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. “Write down the names of some books,” she said. “Maybe we’ll read them.” I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young lives. Stories that use the power of myth to speak truth to the human heart. Charles de Lint creates a magical world that’s not off in a distant Neverland but here and now and accessible, formed by the “magic” of friendship, art, community, and social activism. Although most of his books have not been published specifically for adolescents and young adults, nonetheless young readers find them and embrace them with particular passion. I’ve long lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people from troubled backgrounds say that books by Charles saved them in their youth, and kept them going. Recently I saw that parole officer again, and I asked after his work. “Gets harder every year,” he said. “Or maybe I’m just getting old.” He stopped me as I turned to go. “That writer? That Charles de Lint? My wife got me to read them books…. Sometimes I pass them to the kids.” “Do they like them?” I asked him curiously. “If I can get them to read, they do. I tell them: Stories are important.” And then he looked at me and smiled.

MADDY’S TRUTHS Make room for who you are by knowing who you’re not. Smile all the time, at everyone, without exception: when you’re happy it will be contagious, and when you’re angry it will drive the person you’re mad at bonkers. Blow-dry before lipstick. Counters before sweeping. Water before dinner. To hell with what everyone thinks about your life, but you should know what you think about it. Don’t stay out past one a.m.—nobody is proud of the stories born later than that. Plans contingent on perfection fail. It’s dangerous to fight who you are. The stupidest thing you can do is believe your own bullshit, but you probably will every once in a while. Flowery perfume smells like a cover-up. Don’t have a room your kids can’t play in or a couch your kids can’t sit on; it’s their house too. If you don’t know what to say, say, “I don’t know what to say.” If you mess up, say, “I messed up.” If you need help, say, “I need help.” Never count on any one thing. Don’t confuse wanting to have sex and rent movies with someone for wanting to marry him. Never buy button-fly jeans—they aren’t flattering on anyone ever.

In the words of Mr Thierry Coup of Warner Bros: 'We are taking the most iconic and powerful moments of the stories and putting them in an immersive environment. It is taking the theme park experience to a new level.' And of course I wish Thierry and his colleagues every possible luck, and I am sure it will be wonderful. But I cannot conceal my feelings; and the more I think of those millions of beaming kids waving their wands and scampering the Styrofoam turrets of Hogwartse_STmk, and the more I think of those millions of poor put-upon parents who must now pay to fly to Orlando and pay to buy wizard hats and wizard cloaks and wizard burgers washed down with wizard meade_STmk, the more I grind my teeth in jealous irritation. Because the fact is that Harry Potter is not American. He is British. Where is Diagon Alley, where they buy wands and stuff? It is in London, and if you want to get into the Ministry of Magic you disappear down a London telephone box. The train for Hogwarts goes from King's Cross, not Grand Central Station, and what is Harry Potter all about? It is about the ritual and intrigue and dorm-feast excitement of a British boarding school of a kind that you just don't find in America. Hogwarts is a place where children occasionally get cross with each other—not 'mad'—and where the situation is usually saved by a good old British sense of HUMOUR. WITH A U. RIGHT? NOT HUMOR. GOTTIT?

Adults are not idiots often in books such as this one, the opposite impression is given. Adults in those stories will either (a) get captured, (b) disappear conspicuously when there is trouble, or (c) refuse to help. ( im not sure what authors have against adults, but everyone seems to hate them to an extent usually reserved for dogs and mothers. Why else make them out to make such idiots? "Ah look, the dark lord of evil has come to attack the castle! Annnd. ther's my lunch break. Have fun saving the word on your own kids") In the real world adults tend to get involved in everything whether you want them to or not. They won't disappear when the dark lord appears, though they may try to sue them. This discrepancy is yet another proof that most books are fantasies while this book is utterly true and invaluable. you see in this book, I will make it completely clear that adults are not idiots. they are however hairy Adults are like hairy kids who like to tell other what to do. Dispite what other books may claim they do have their uses, they can reach things on high shelves for instance... Regardless, i often wish that the two groups-adults and kids- could find a way to get along better. Some sort of treaty or something. The biggest problem is the adults have one of the most effective recruitment stratagies in the world. Give them enough time and they'll turn any kid into one of them.

I’d found my niche. Since I belonged to no group I learned to move seamlessly between groups. I floated. I was a chameleon, still, a cultural chameleon. I learned how to blend. I could play sports with the jocks. I could talk computers with the nerds. I could jump in the circle and dance with the township kids. I popped around to everyone, working, chatting, telling jokes, making deliveries. I was like a weed dealer, but of food. The weed guy is always welcome at the party. He’s not a part of the circle, but he’s invited into the circle temporarily because of what he can offer. That’s who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up. You don’t ask to be accepted for everything you are, just the one part of yourself that you’re willing to share. For me it was humor. I learned that even though I didn’t belong to one group, I could be a part of any group that was laughing. I’d drop in, pass out the snacks, tell a few jokes. I’d perform for them. I’d catch a bit of their conversation, learn more about their group, and then leave. I never overstayed my welcome. I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t an outcast. I was everywhere with everybody, and at the same time I was all by myself.

Each time I wondered at how any of them could ever consider that life would be better without them, and then I remembered that it’s the same thing I struggle with when my brain tries to kill me. And so they’ve saved me too. That’s why I continue to talk about mental illness, even at the cost of scaring people off or having people judge me. I try to be honest about the shame I feel because with honesty comes empowerment. And also, understanding. I know that if I go out on a stage and have a panic attack, I can duck behind the podium and hide for a minute and no one is going to judge me. They already know I’m crazy. And they still love me in spite of it. In fact, some love me because of it. Because there is something wonderful in accepting someone else’s flaws, especially when it gives you the chance to accept your own and see that those flaws are the things that make us human. I do worry that one day other kids will taunt my daughter when they’re old enough to read and know my story. Sometimes I wonder if the best thing to do is just to be quiet and stop waving the banner of “fucked up and proud of it,” but I don’t think I’ll put down this banner until someone takes it away from me. Because quitting might be easier, but it wouldn’t be better.

...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get. See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On. The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour. And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.

Are you okay?” he says. My breath shakes. “Do you know the story of the Prodigal Son?” “Oh my god. Rev—” “Do you?” He sighs. “I don’t remember the whole thing.” So I tell him the story. He listens. When I’m done, he says, “What does that have to do with anything?” “Which one am I?” I finally ask. “Rev—” “I didn’t stay with my father. So I’m obviously not the devoted son.” “Dude.” “But is that saying that if I went back to him, he’d welcome me with open arms? Am I supposed to be that son?” “Are you listening to yourself right now?” “No.” I study him. My voice is a breath away from breaking. “Help me, Dec. Which one am I?” His eyes are dark and serious. “Neither. Is that what you need me to say? You’re neither son. “But—” “You’re not selfish. You wouldn’t be the son who asks for his money and leaves. And you’re not spiteful. You don’t resent anyone, even the one person you should.” I flinch again. “Don’t you understand? I have to be one or the other.” “No, you don’t! You moron, there are three people in the story.” “What?” “You’re neither son, Rev. If you’re anyone, you’re the man who watched his kids act like total dicks, only to stand there with open arms and forgive them.” I’m speechless. I might be gaping at him. As many times as I’ve read that parable, I’ve never considered a third perspective. But of course it’s right there. It’s so clear. Declan pulls his pillow away from the wall, fluffs it up, and lies back down. He yawns. “Now. Tell me about the girl.

Look, back in the old days, ravens used to be gentle and white, like doves, okay? But they were terrible gossips. One time I was dating this girl, Koronis. The ravens found out she was cheating on me, and they told me about it. I was so angry, I got Artemis to kill Koronis for me. Then I punished the ravens for being tattletales by turning them black.” Reyna stared at me like she was contemplating another kick to my nose. “That story is messed up on so many levels.” “Just wrong,” Meg agreed. “You had your sister kill a girl who was cheating on you?” “Well, I—” “Then you punished the birds that told you about it,” Reyna added, “by turning them black, as if black was bad and white was good?” “When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound right,” I protested. “It’s just what happened when my curse scorched them. It also made them nasty-tempered flesh-eaters.” “Oh, that’s much better,” Reyna snarled. “If we let the birds eat you,” Meg asked, “will they leave Reyna and me alone?” “I—What?” I worried that Meg might not be kidding. Her facial expression did not say kidding. It said serious about the birds eating you. “Listen, I was angry! Yes, I took it out on the birds, but after a few centuries I cooled down. I apologized. By then, they kind of liked being nasty-tempered flesh-eaters. As for Koronis—I mean, at least I saved the child she was pregnant with when Artemis killed her. He became Asclepius, god of medicine!” “Your girlfriend was pregnant when you had her killed?” Reyna launched another kick at my face. I managed to dodge it, since I’d had a lot of practice cowering, but it hurt to know that this time she hadn’t been aiming at an incoming raven. Oh, no. She wanted to knock my teeth in. “You suck,” Meg agreed.

At some point in this course, perhaps even tonight, you will read something difficult, something you only partially understand, and your verdict will be this is stupid. Will I argue when you advance that opinion in class the next day? Why would I do such a useless ting? My time with you in short, only thirty-four weeks of classes, and I will not waste it arguing about the merits of this short story or that poem. Why would I, when all such opinions are subjective, and no final resolution can ever be reached?' Some of the kids - Gloria was one of them - now looked lost, but Pete understood exactly what Mr. Ricker, aka Ricky the Hippie, was talking about... 'Time is the answer," Mr Ricker said on the first day of Pete's sophomore year. He strode back and forth, antique bellbottoms swishing, occasionally waving his arms. "Yes! Time mercilessly culls away the is-stupid from the not-stupid." ... "It will occur for you, young ladies and gentlemen, although I will be in your rear-view mirror by the time it happens. Shall I tell you how it happens? You will read something - perhaps 'Dulce et Decorum Est,' by Wilfred Owen. Shall we use that as an example? Why not?' Then, in a deeper voice that sent chills up Pete's back and tightened his throat, Mr. Ricker cried, " 'Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge...' And son on. Cetra-cetra. Some of you will say, This is stupid." .... 'And yet!" Up went the finger. "Time will pass! Tempus will fugit! Owen's poem may fall away from your mind, in which case your verdict of is-stupid will have turned out to be correct. For you, at least. But for some of you, it will recur. And recur. Each time it does, the steady march of your maturity will deepen its resonance. Each time that poem sneaks back into your mind, it will seem a little less stupid and a little more vital. A little more important. Until it shines, young ladies and gentlemen. Until it shines.

Then he says, “I once read a story about three brothers who washed up on an island in Hawaii. A myth. An old one. I read it when I was a kid, so I probably don’t have the story exactly right, but it goes something like this. Three brothers went out fishing and got caught in a storm. They drifted on the ocean for a long time until they washed up on the shore of an uninhabited island. It was a beautiful island with coconuts growing there and tons of fruit on the trees, and a big, high mountain in the middle. The night they got there, a god appeared in their dreams and said, ‘A little farther down the shore, you will find three big, round boulders. I want each of you to push his boulder as far as he likes. The place you stop pushing your boulder is where you will live. The higher you go, the more of the world you will be able to see from your home. It’s entirely up to you how far you want to push your boulder.’” The young man takes a drink of water and pauses for a moment. Mari looks bored, but she is clearly listening. “Okay so far?” he asks. Mari nods. “Want to hear the rest? If you’re not interested, I can stop.” “If it’s not too long.” “No, it’s not too long. It’s a pretty simple story.” He takes another sip of water and continues with his story. “So the three brothers found three boulders on the shore just as the god had said they would. And they started pushing them along as the god told them to. Now these were huge, heavy boulders, so rolling them was hard, and pushing them up an incline took an enormous effort. The youngest brother quit first. He said, ‘Brothers, this place is good enough for me. It’s close to the shore, and I can catch fish. It has everything I need to go on living. I don’t mind if I can’t see that much of the world from here.’ His two elder brothers pressed on, but when they were midway up the mountain, the second brother quit. He said, ‘Brother, this place is good enough for me. There is plenty of fruit here. It has everything I need to go on living. I don’t mind if I can’t see that much of the world from here.’ The eldest brother continued walking up the mountain. The trail grew increasingly narrow and steep, but he did not quit. He had great powers of perseverance, and he wanted to see as much of the world as he possibly could, so he kept rolling the boulder with all his might. He went on for months, hardly eating or drinking, until he had rolled the boulder to the very peak of the high mountain. There he stopped and surveyed the world. Now he could see more of the world than anyone. This was the place he would live—where no grass grew, where no birds flew. For water, he could only lick the ice and frost. For food, he could only gnaw on moss. Be he had no regrets, because now he could look out over the whole world. And so, even today, his great, round boulder is perched on the peak of that mountain on an island in Hawaii. That’s how the story goes.

The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.” Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention. Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the victims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked. The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting? The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.

of the problem was that Chaos got a little creation-happy. It thought to its misty, gloomy self: Hey, Earth and Sky. That was fun! I wonder what else I can make. Soon it created all sorts of other problems—and by that I mean gods. Water collected out of the mist of Chaos, pooled in the deepest parts of the earth, and formed the first seas, which naturally developed a consciousness—the god Pontus. Then Chaos really went nuts and thought: I know! How about a dome like the sky, but at the bottom of the earth! That would be awesome! So another dome came into being beneath the earth, but it was dark and murky and generally not very nice, since it was always hidden from the light of the sky. This was Tartarus, the Pit of Evil; and as you can guess from the name, when he developed a godly personality, he didn't win any popularity contests. The problem was, both Pontus and Tartarus liked Gaea, which put some pressure on her relationship with Ouranos. A bunch of other primordial gods popped up, but if I tried to name them all we’d be here for weeks. Chaos and Tartarus had a kid together (don’t ask how; I don’t know) called Nyx, who was the embodiment of night. Then Nyx, somehow all by herself, had a daughter named Hemera, who was Day. Those two never got along because they were as different as…well, you know. According to some stories, Chaos also created Eros, the god of procreation... in other words, mommy gods and daddy gods having lots of little baby gods. Other stories claim Eros was the son of Aphrodite. We’ll get to her later. I don’t know which version is true, but I do know Gaea and Ouranos started having kids—with very mixed results. First, they had a batch of twelve—six girls and six boys called the Titans. These kids looked human, but they were much taller and more powerful. You’d figure twelve kids would be enough for anybody, right? I mean, with a family that big, you’ve basically got your own reality TV show. Plus, once the Titans were born, things started to go sour with Ouranos and Gaea’s marriage. Ouranos spent a lot more time hanging out in the sky. He didn't visit. He didn't help with the kids. Gaea got resentful. The two of them started fighting. As the kids grew older, Ouranos would yell at them and basically act like a horrible dad. A few times, Gaea and Ouranos tried to patch things up. Gaea decided maybe if they had another set of kids, it would bring them closer…. I know, right? Bad idea. She gave birth to triplets. The problem: these new kids defined the word UGLY. They were as big and strong as Titans, except hulking and brutish and in desperate need of a body wax. Worst of all, each kid had a single eye in the middle of his forehead. Talk about a face only a mother could love. Well, Gaea loved these guys. She named them the Elder Cyclopes, and eventually they would spawn a whole race of other, lesser Cyclopes. But that was much later. When Ouranos saw the Cyclops triplets, he freaked. “These cannot be my kids! They don’t even look like me!” “They are your children, you deadbeat!” Gaea screamed back. “Don’t you dare leave me to raise them on my own!