'Do you remember the lake?' she said, in an abrupt voice, under the
pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her
throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said 'lake.' For
she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and
at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the
lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them...
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Literature is a source of pleasure...it is one of the rare inexhaustible
joys in life, but it's not only that. It must not be dissociated from
reality. Everything is there. That is why I never use the word fiction.
Every subtlety in life is material for a book....Have you noticed...that
I'm talking about novels? Novels don't contain only exceptional
situations, life or death choices, or major ordeals; there are also
everyday difficulties, temptations, ordinary disappointments; and, in
response, every human attitude, every type of behavior, from the finest
to the most wretched. There are books where, as you read, you wonder:
What would I have done? It's a question you have to ask yourself. Listen
carefully: it is a way to learn to live. There are grown-ups who will
say no, literature is not life, that novels teach you nothing. They are
wrong. Literature informs, instructs, it prepares you for life.
- Laurence Cossé, A Novel Bookstore
(tr. Alison Anderson)
descensus Averno facilis est