applicable quote man wrote:
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
My two favorite books to this day -- both of which will outlast all the people who have called them childish, unrealistic, not real literature.
"Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories...In such stories comes a piercing glimpse of joy." --J.R.R. Tolkien
"I did not start by trying to describe the folks next door—but by inventing people who did things the folks next door would never do. I could summon no interest or enthusiasm for “people as they are”—when I had in my mind a blinding vision of people as they could be." --Ayn Rand
"I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?" --J.R.R. Tolkien, continued
"The best of mankind’s youth start life with an undefined sense of enormous expectation, the sense that one’s life is important, that great achievements are within one’s capacity, and that great things lie ahead...Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lose it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one’s mind; security, of abandoning one’s values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that the fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality." --Ayn Rand yet again
The first time I read Anthem, I knew that it said what I had always believed, but had never known how to put into words. Someone, reading this, understands that experience. The rest -- well, that's their business.