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"Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world, I said, "but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be-it isn't a mirror, it's an aspiration."
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"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
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Personal Development
"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
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Personal Development
"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
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"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
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"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
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"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
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"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
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"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
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"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
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"True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good--and we all know how rare that is..."
Morality
"Now and again. Good residency is about having the power to ask someone to do something, but not necessarily exercising it."
Leadership
"I got mixed up with some oddness in my youth, and the long and short of it is that I can't shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics."
Commitment
"I'm sure it's not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats."
Reality
"Those that can be troubled to muse upon the meaning of life are general disappointed when they figure it out."
Meaning
"For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas."
Ideas
"What is without dispute...is that the readers need [the BookWorld] just as much as we need them-to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else."
Reading
"She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of life looking like Daniel Radcliffe."
Identity
"I liked him, but since his particular field of interest was Remote Suggestion--the skill of projecting thoughts into people's heads from a distance--I didn't know whether I actually liked him or he was just suggesting I like him, which was both creepy and unethical. In fact, the whole Remote Suggestion or "seeding" idea had been banned once it was discovered to be the key ingredient in promoting talent less boy bands, which had until then been something of a mystery."
Ethics
"Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms-of life, of love, of knowledge-has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath."
Storytelling
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