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1 " That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer… It is not to science, therefore but to metaphysics, imaginative literature or religion that we must turn for answers to questions having to do with first and last things. "
2 " ...the rationale for the existence of literature lies precisely in its ability to work on issues that concern us deeply. And it does so in a way that keeps our motivation at its highest intensity. Literature is fuel for 'hot cognition.' One may presume that imaginative literature is a property that all human cultures possess and as such may provide humans with an evolutionary advantage. "
3 " Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you. "
― Mortimer J. Adler , How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
4 " The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller. "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination
5 " Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own. "
― James W. Sire , How to Read Slowly
6 " Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. "
― Harold Bloom , The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
