The characters in fiction are just wiggles of ink on paper (or chemical stains on celluloid). They are ink people. They live in ink houses inside ink towns. They work at ink jobs. They have inky problems. They sweat ink and cry ink, and when they are cut they bleed ink. And yet ink people press effortlessly through the porous membrane separating their inky world from ours. They move through our flesh-and-blood world and wield real power in it. As we have seen, this is spectacularly true of sacred fictions. The ink people of scripture have a real presence in our world. They shape our behaviours and our customs, and in so doing, they transform societies and histories.
Quotation: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human. By Jonathan Gottschall. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012
