CARRY ME DOWN
M.J. Hyland

'No storybooks,' he says, 'means no reading stories.'
'Yes sir,' I say.
'No reading stories means no imagination. We all start life with an imagination, of course, but without stories to feed it the imagination, like a starved dog, dies.'
He stares out at the playing field. 'And when a person doesn't read and when a person has no imagination they are sure to end up with no inventiveness of mind and spend a life with nothing but hackneyed, worn-out things to say. A life of slogans, jargon and cliches.'

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