"The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word."
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Fantasy authorsNovelists from the United StatesSatirists from the United StatesAutobiographers from the United StatesPeople from Richmond
Original Language: English
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Ch. 27 : Evolution of a Vestryman
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Branch_Cabell
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James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabell (14 April 1879 – 5 May 1958) was an American author of satirical fantasy works, most notably The Cream of the Jest, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice, Figures of Earth, and other works in the series known as Biography of the Life of Manuel.
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