Other people's stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.

...If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age. We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

Alone, no one wins freedom.