“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
— James Baldwin, from an interview featured in Conversations With James Baldwin
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”
— Alan Bennett, The History Boys
“Sometimes I tell myself my fate is unique. Consider all other men fortunate, I tell myself; no one has ever suffered like you. Then I read a poet of ancient times, and it is as though I were looking deep into my own heart.”
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
"Has it ever happened to you, to come across some vague idea of one's own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?"
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Comment to Sheilah Graham (c. 1938)
