The Magic of Stories.
"But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon, and a slim young man I killed, and an old man sprawled beside a pig-pen, and several others whose bodies I once lifted and dumped into a truck. They're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
...
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.
...
That's what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk.
...
She died, of course. Nine years old and she died. It was a brain tumor. She lived through the summer and into the first part of September, and then she was dead.
But in a story, I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. In a story, miracles can happen. Linda can smile and sit up. She can reach out, touch my wrist, and say, 'Timmy, stop crying.'
I needed that kind of miracle."
--The Lives of the Dead, The Things They Carried by Tim O'brien.
...
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.
...
That's what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk.
...
She died, of course. Nine years old and she died. It was a brain tumor. She lived through the summer and into the first part of September, and then she was dead.
But in a story, I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. In a story, miracles can happen. Linda can smile and sit up. She can reach out, touch my wrist, and say, 'Timmy, stop crying.'
I needed that kind of miracle."
--The Lives of the Dead, The Things They Carried by Tim O'brien.