Orts #702

If you want truth tracked to where it is hidden, call a journalist; theirs is an honorable mission. But leave to the novelists the country of Maybe in the land of What If, where all the animals are shadow puppets, and the rivers divide into countless streams that flow to a bottomless sea.

     — David Shafer, in an Op-Ed article, A Scandal at the C.I.A. Maybe, in The New York Times, August 27, 2014

The whole spectrum of fictional possibility includes the infra-red of pure history and the ultra-violet of pure imagination . . .  and in-between we can distinguish many shades of coloration . . . But all are fragments of the white radiance of truth which is present in both history books and fairy tales . . . .  truth is like ordinary light, present everywhere but invisible, and we must break it to behold it.

     — Robert Scholes, in The Elements of Fiction

I am . . . led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative.

     — E. L. Doctorow, in an essay, False Documents (1977)

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Ed.note: The William Godwin quote in Orts #699 is from his essay Of History and Romance (1797).
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