“How should we deal with intrusions of fiction into life, now that we have seen the historical impact that this phenomenon can have? … Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.”
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994) Chapter Six: "Fictional Protocols"
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Umberto Eco120
Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic… 1932–2016Related quotes
Sarah Caudwell (1939–2000) English barrister and writer
“No one in life can ever match fiction”
Sabrina Jeffries (1960) American writer
Source: The Truth About Lord Stoneville
Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer
Source: Turning to one another (2002), p. 92
Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist
“Morality and literature,” pp. 161-162
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)
Context: It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.
“All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.”
Orson Scott Card book Children of the Mind
Source: Children of the Mind
Adam Silvera (1990) American author
On what he aims for as a storyteller in “History Is All You Left Me Author Adam Silvera Talks Second Books and More with Nicola Yoon” https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/teen/history-left-author-adam-silvera-talks-second-books-nicola-yoon/ (Barnes & Noble; 2017 Jan 19)
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States
Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883) English poet and writer
Letter to William Makepeace Thackeray (1831); quoted in The Life of Edward FitzGerald, Translator of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyán (1947) by Alfred McKinley Terhune, p. 57.
Context: Having seen how many follow and have followed false religions, and having our reason utterly against many of the principal points of the Bible, we require the most perfect evidence of facts, before we can believe. If you can prove to me that one miracle took place, I will believe that he is a just God who damned us all because a woman ate an apple; and you can't expect greater complaisance than that to be sure.