..Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human
hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger
or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation
marks.
Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and
ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could
be more frail than that?
But some stories, small, simple ones about
setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and
monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them
have outlasted the lands in which they were created..
Neil Gaiman
