There is this old Celtic thing, that there is very little difference between a song and a poem, between a poem and a story, between a story and a prayer, so that anytime someone is singing a song,or telling a story or reading poetry to a child, they are also inviting the child into a prayer. There’s never a need to talk down to the child at all, because something in the child already knows all this and is waiting to hear it again. So that parents and teachers who give great stories or poems to children are feeding this old soul that is in the child and are reassuring the child that they have come to the right world, that, yes, the world may be confusing and increasingly chaotic, but this is the world where the words are said.
—Michael Meade
All good stories have one thing in common: they are truer than if they had really happened. And after you read one of them, you feel that all that happened, happened, to you, and that it belongs to you forever.
—Ernest Hemingway
