Acts of faith

  
“Both reading and writing are, then, acts of supreme faith.  They are both, in essence, a call to grace, a belief in the miraculous – that we might come to see through stories what we had not previously seen, that we might come to understand what had, before that moment, remained uncertain, undefined.  The mask of fiction, of writing and reading stories, does not, in the end, disguise our faces but instead reveals who we really are.  In the end, I think, stories acknowledge life’s difficulty and sadness but insist that we go on anyway, that we always hold to our faith, to our belief in grace.”
 
– John Gregory Brown