the word fantasy remains ambiguous, standing between the false, the foolish, the delusory, the shallows of the mind, and the mind’s deep connection with the real. On this threshold it sometimes faces one way, masked and costumed, frivolous, an escapist; then it turns, and we glimpse as it turns the face of an angel, bright truthful messenger, arise

Only the imagination can get us out of the bind of the eternal present, inventing or hypothesizing or pretending or discovering a way that reason can then follow into the infinity of options, a clue through the labyrinths of choice, a golden string, the story, leading us to the freedom that is properly human, the freedom open to those whose minds c

And she tells me that the word fantasy also came to mean the imagination itself, “the process, the faculty, or the result of forming mental representations of things not actually present.” And again, those representations, those imaginations, can be true ones, or false. They can be the insights and foresights that make human life possible, or the d

Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.

the knowledge that everything that exists, exists with absolute exactness and ultimately whatever she ended up doing or not doing would not escape that exactness; something the size of a pinhead would not extend by a fraction of a millimeter beyond the size of a pinhead: everything that existed was of a great perfection. Except most of what existed

Fiction is invention, but it is not lies. It moves on a different level of reality from either fact-finding or lying.

the word fantasy remains ambiguous, standing between the false, the foolish, the delusory, the shallows of the mind, and the mind’s deep connection with the real. On this threshold it sometimes faces one way, masked and costumed, frivolous, an escapist; then it turns, and we glimpse as it turns the face of an angel, bright truthful messenger, arise

Fiction is often really much more useful than lived experience; it takes much less time, costs nothing (from the library), and comes in a manageable, orderly form. You can understand it. Experience just steamrollers over you and you begin to see what happened only years and years later, if ever. Fiction is much better than reality at providing usef