"I read something that moved me a lot not very long ago. I was reading something by Chesterton, and he was talking about one of the Brontes,... or Jane Eyre that she wrote.He said if you want to know what that is like, you go and you look out at the city-I think he was looking at London-and he said, you know, you see all those houses now, even at the end of the 19th century, and they look all as if they're the same. And you think all of those people are out there, going to work, and they're all the same. But, he says,what Bronte tells you is they are not the same. Each one of those persons and each one of those houses and each one of those families is different, and they each have a story to tell. Each of those stories involves something about human passion. Each of those stories involves a man, a woman, chil- dren, families, work, lives. And you get that sense out of the book. So sometimes I have found literature very helpful as a way out of the tower."
Stephen G. Breyer
Confirmation Hearings for Stephen G. Breyer to be an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 103d Cong, 2d Sess 89 (July 13, 1994) (Miller Reporting transcript).
It makes no odds into what seeming deserts the poet is born. Though all his neighbors pronounce it a Sahara, it will be a paradise to him; for the desert which we see is the result of the barrenness of our experience.—Journal, 6 May 1854
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