The Neverending Story

 Happy birthday to children’s novelist Michael Ende born in Garmisch-Partenkirchen Germany (1929). He is most famous for The Neverending Story (1979). In it, he wrote:

“If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger —

“If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early —

“If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless —

“If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won’t understand what Bastian did next.”

From Writer's Almanac.

From me: The movie probably was a good attempt to show the wonderful ideas in The Never Ending Story...it had lots of flaws, but perhaps children are more forgiving.