Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Perhaps only this echo of material interest can counterbalance the instinctive gesture of contemporary man: that of throwing things away.

[1980]

The sense of realism was so intense that the painting effortlessly achieved the effect sought by the old Flemish masters: the integration of the spectator into the pictorial whole, persuading him that the space in which he stood was the same as that represented in the painting, as if the picture were a fragment of reality, or reality a fragment of the picture.

Fear so debased people's thinking, they saw deceit in bravery, collaboration in courage.

As long as the son who has moved to the city visits his native village a few years later as if it were some exotic land, the nation to which he belongs will never be modern.

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories

Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

While your body is always fixed at a particular point in space-time, your mind is always free to ramble in lands of make-believe. And it does.

The writer guides the way we imagine but does not determine it.

While our bodies are always locked into a specific here and now, our imaginations free us to roam space-time.

The brain is not designed for story; there are glitches in its design that make it vulnerable to story. Stories, in all their variety and splendor, are just lucky accidents of the mind’s jury-rigged construction. Story may educate us, deepen us, and give us joy. Story may be one of the things that makes it most worthwhile to be human. But that doesn’t mean story has a biological purpose.