Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture.

Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.

Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally.

I think science has begun to demonstrate that aging is a disease. If it is, it can be cured.

I'll follow him to the ends of the earth,' she sobbed. Yes, darling. But the earth doesn't have any ends. Columbus fixed that.

Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationshiip of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the fish or the Lamb.

To some extent, Seattle remains a frontier metropolis, a place where people can experiment with their lives, and change and grow and make things happen.