When Books Work

When books work well, it isn’t just that we memorize them and then, by our will and our personal wisdom, shape our lives to follow them. Rather, when books work for us, we begin to walk beside the mind that created the book. That mind may be so much wiser than ours, but we walk beside it until soon we are walking like that one.
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Quoted from Hope Grows Best in the Garden of Despair, an Interview with Walter Wangerin, Jr. printed in the book Indelible Ink