Lucy

“I felt the need to write “from life,” that is, to write not her but her reading, to write anything at all, but thinking that it must pass through her reading. Now, looking at the butterfly that lights on my book, I would like to write “from life,” bearing the butterfly in mind. To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow “resembles” the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller