“Perhaps such a book introduces us to ourselves on a higher plateau of sensibility, a plateau on which we then wish to continue outside the book. Though we have rediscovered our forgotten passion by way of the (novel’s) imagination, what it releases inside us, the emotion, is by no means imaginary, it is quite real, as tears or trembling are real; a feeling that wants to be used, that requires personal experience. But in our daily lives there is nothing corresponding to it. Here everything is on a low-calorie emotional diet. Our real life offers us no opportunities to experience satiety. And so a passion ready to be expressed crouches in us after we’ve read the book, but nothing touches it off. After a while this crouching in a tense, contorted position begins to be painful. We contain more feeling than we may release. The surplus of reality which the book junkie has acquired, he must keep bottled up”