The Challenge of a Story

We receive a great gift from storytellers like Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and many others: freedom from mythic rigidities, a vision of a life that fires the imagination, and truths about the civic world and about ourselves. In return, we must open ourselves to truths that often shock and frighten us. (Richard Kuhns, Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling: Author as Midwife and Pimp, 139)

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