Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it’s a manageable size, it’s comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever. Fiction is terrific at giving factual,

Everybody knows utopias are to be read not as novels but as blueprints for social theory or practice.

The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

To be friends with the animals is to be a friend and a child of the world, connected to it, nourished by it, belonging to it.

The problem with all this is that your real is not my real. We don’t all perceive reality the same way. Some of us in fact do not perceive reality at all. You can definitely see that if you watch Fox News.

Perhaps we give animal stories to children and encourage their interest in animals because we see children as inferior, mentally “primitive,” not yet fully human: so we see pets and zoos and animal stories as “natural” steps on the child’s way up to adult, exclusive humanity—rungs

H. G. Wells.

Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are.

Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind.