at the tellers' dispense....

i do it rarely...friends do it sometimes...and there are others i have met
who do it all the time..... they exaggerate while they gossip.... as if-  what happened was not good enough to relate...
their stories bother me sometimes... specially when they were wild and reality and imagination have been weaved in so intricately, so well that it is difficult to know one from the other.... it bothers me then...
it bothers me when their stories crossed all lines, deny all logical reasoning... nevertheless they do it all the time and it bothers me sometimes....

but recently i read a passage, that i quote, which justified all such idle talk...
and now i have begun to relish their stories and at times i feel had it not been for them, life might have been so boring.....

"From complete invention, Cosimo, I believe, had arrived, by successive approximations, at an almost entirely truthful account of the facts. He told this two or three times; then finding the his audience never tired of listening to the story and new listeners always coming and asking for details, he found himself making new additions, amplifying, exaggerating, introducing new characters and episodes, so that the tale got quite distorted and became even more of an invention than it had been at first."  

~ extract from Baron in the Trees, 

                        Italo Calvino. 


[image found via google search]