The Archive of Alternate Endings

It is easy to forget, but stories need not always have a purpose. We are quick to say that folktales have a moral or a lesson or a creed. But most of the stories that have survived the ages are told for one purpose only, and that purpose is to say this: "Being human is difficult. Here is some evidence.

... there are two kinds of labyrinths: those you are born into and must escape, and those you choose to enter in search of what lies inside.

Let us hope that the universe beyond our earth is kinder.

What is story if not the safe harbor for our most disturbing imaginings? I learned early that the notion of what will come to pass haunts better. But, too, it is about the storyteller—who you choose to trust and why. From where comes your decision to believe the breath that leaves the mouth that tells.

Which is to say, when enough people have been hurt by coded forms of hate, they will gather and they will start a war.

He is thinking: How do I begin to build a structure around this loss? How do I reshape my world around the grid of their absence? The writer is thinking: How does one narrate when faced with a story for which there is no language?

Jacob will think: What is at stake in sharing this story? And Wilhelm will think: What is at stake in leaving this story untold?

Maybe we aren't the authors of our own end but minor players in a much more cosmic tale.

The writer is thinking: How does one narrate when faced with a story for which there is no language?

To read is to consume, to put the book on the tongue and push it down the throat.

Most stories that have survived the ages are told for one purpose only, and that purpose is to say this: “Being human is difficult. Here is some evidence.

Though she cannot read, she knows well that what gets committed to the page, what gets translated into the code of letters and locked in the coffin of a book, becomes truth while everything else dissolves into the abyss of history lost.

No one alive knows who was born first, and so no one knows in which body he dwells--the original or the copy.

His invention is for her, and all those who need a way to tell their stories. It is for every sister who once had a story that went unbelieved. When people ask him what he’s invented, he tells them this: a device that will make the world listen.

To the sky, we are just another natural phenomenon that will leave an insubstantial trace, a fossilized arrangement of bone here, the crater of a long-melted glacier there. If only we were privileged with such distance, perhaps we could see how minor we all are, all our art and thought and illness and meaning reduced to a bit of debris, the detritus on one of a million spheres stupidly looping nothing.

Wilhelm pensa a cosa significhi narrare. Esiste un modo di raccontare che dia credito alle voci che hanno tramandato la storia? Jacob pensa a cosa significhi desiderare. Il desiderio richiede partecipazione o può affiorare in segreto, consapevole ma sospeso, nascosto con cura?

Mouths, the illustrator thinks, this story is fell of mouths: mouths that cannot be fed, mouths belonging to children that fill themselves with the witch's bait, mouths of ovens that consume, the mouth of the witch who wants to eat the children. We think of this as a story about two children abandoned in a wood by thier parents and the way breadcrumbs fail to lead them home. We thinks of this as a story about escaping supernatural atrocities. But perhaps it is really a story about how to eat, who to fill the gut with, and why. Perhaps this is a story about the way the body aches to be satisfied, and how we call this both hunger and desire.