A book isn't a gym; it doesn't exist for you, to fix you, but for itself alone.

there's a particular fulfillment that we only get from narrativizing reality, from the satisfaction of familiar procedure and familiar if incorrect facts, from reducing public institutions and individuals into something we can easily grasp. This, I think, holds the key to why this kind of story takes up so much space in most of our lives, and why w

it's dangerous to imagine human beings as less than human, especially when their oppression arises from already being perceived as less than human in the first place. A flat character is more than an aesthetic mistake: it's a political error too, even if placed in the service of good politics.

In the serious literary novel, it generally remains easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

there is no objectivity in taste, simply more or less intelligent expression of why you like or dislike something, an idea which may seem threatening or even dangerous if you're the sort of person who has based your identity on a sense of cultural superiority or on sensitivity to imaginary elitists who are sitting in judgment. The only truly "

I was supposed to write about my immediate sensory experiences, my social mistakes and my small depressions, to imagine nothing outside myself and my feelings. Our teachers (who were mostly white women, teaching classes mostly composed of young white women) encouraged us to write what we knew, and we were supposed to know as little as possible.

As with most modes of binary thinking, this creates superficial and destructive patterns: pretending that the conflict over pop culture is a simple battle between the right versus the woke corporatists allows the right to dictate the shape of reality, recasting diversity as a sincere corporate concern.

Sometimes what's wrong with reality is deeper than individual moral failings; sometimes our problems are greater than an inability to see each other's point of view. And boiling everything down to a failure of individual understanding can work as a neat and deliberate deflection away from those problems.

Summerscale concludes The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by suggesting that "the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional," is "to transform sensation, horror, and grief, into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away."