Changed by reading

Ursula K. Le Guin on reading novels.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard just to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

From the Prologue of The Left Hand of Darkness.