Carl Sagan
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
Comments
What Carl Said
Sagan wrote non-fiction. His quote could be taken even further for fiction.
A good fiction author is capable of simultaneously being inside her own mind, the minds of each of her characters, and the mind of the read. She tells her story through plot, characterization, and setting, while utilizing all of our senses. Her heart is on display in every word choice.
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
But Carl's message was not
But Carl's message was not about how we can imagine things of our own volition, but how the reader can be transported into the mind of the writer who is imagining those things, so that they seem like they are really there.
I haven't seen this quote before, but I have many times thought exactly this. How those squiggles in front of our eyes seamlessly transfer into thoughts, having invisibly gone through characters, sentences, and paragraphs.
It truly is magnificent.
And Taken Farther
books; words have resonance and power. David Hawkins book Power vs Force is a guide to distinguish power, truth, love from force, lies, and fear. Some writers you might not like being in the head of.
I do love to read and write but didn't do either for a long time; computers and electronic publications has given me a fresh start. Yes I agree books are wonderful.