In my Commonplace...

"The Story

It (the story) feeds and enriches the life of the spirit, enlarging the hearers' and teller's experiences, and the story teller must ever bear his high calling in mind. There should surely be no more splendid mission, yet we still find that small reasons and aims are offered for the telling of stories...they are to give information, to cultivate the habit of concentration;...to form a basis for composition and other language exercises...to be a peg on which to hang various school activities. Let us be simple and wise and honest enough to to tell the story for the pure love of telling it, for 'it is in beauty and love and joy and laughter that we must find the way of speaking to the soul--the soul that does not appear in the statistics and is therefore always left out of the accounts.'"  W.A. Bone