'Two questions I can't really answerr about fiction are (1) where it comes from, and (2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute. There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, save survival and procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomlous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell. The advice I give to my students is the same advice I give myself - forget definition, forget assumption, watch. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous.'
Marilynne Robinson, 'Fredom of Thought' in When I Was a Child I Read Books, p.7.
