THE THING WITH WORDS IS THAT THAT'S ALL THEY ARE
“……the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how very strong they really were, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wing of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things can prove remarkably difficult to kill.
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 can 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 outlasted the lands in which they were created.”
- Fragile Things
Neil Gaiman
On the first day of spring, 2006