book report: fragile things.

fragile things: short fiction and wonders by Neil Gaiman:

Neil Gaiman is now probably my favorite author. I feel terrible kicking Kurt Vonnegut out of first place, but every time I read something by Neil Gaiman I am just amazed and entranced. That sounds seriously fruity, but it's so true. His knack, no, gift for storytelling is pretty much unbeatable. fragile things is a collection of his short stories throughout the years and is a good sampling of how he can write wonderfully across genres. October in the Chair was probably my favorite piece from this book but also among my favorites are the short stories:

Closing Time (a playhouse can be the scariest of things)
Bitter Grounds (zombies!)
Other People (I hope this is the true version of hell)
Keepsakes and Treasures ( makes you think about how the rich really use their money)
The Monarch of the Glen ( OK, it's incredibly dorky how excited I got when I realized what this novella was about. American Gods is one of my favorite books by Neil and this novella was an extension to that brilliant novel! It is located at the end of this collection, and what a way to
end it!)

highlighted quotes:

People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts. (pg. xiv)

Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are the currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.) (pg. xxiv)

I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. (pg. xxiv)

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 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. (pg. xxxii)

The young man looked down at the bird. "It's literature," he explained, as if to a child. "Real literature. Real life. The real world. It's an artist's job to show people the world they live in. We hold up mirrors." (Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves... , pg. 61)

"And he still thinks, in the little bit of his head that's still him, that he's not a zombie. That he's not dead, that there's a threshold he hasn't stepped over. But he crossed it long time ago." (Bitter Grounds, pg. 105)

That night, after the shower, which could not wash what she had had to do away, not really, she said to her husband, "I'm scared."
"Of what?"
"That this job is making me hard. That it's making me someone else. Someone I don't know anymore."
He pulled her close and held her, and they stayed touching, skin to skin, until dawn. (Strange Little Girls, pg. 163)

...if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us. (Strange Little Girls, pg. 164)