Romany Arrowsmith

“The heart of man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls Him. Though now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Disgraced he may be, yet is not de-throned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned: Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons – ‘twas our right (used or misused). That right has not decayed: we make still by the law in which we’re made.”
― Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

“Man, Sub-creator’ was in one sense a new way of expressing what is often called ‘the willing suspension of disbelief, and Tolkien made it the central argument of the lecture.
‘What really happens,’ he wrote, ‘is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator”. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”
― Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

“What was I? Exactly what Conchis had had me told: nothing but the net sum of countless wrong turnings. Why? I dismissed most of the Freudian jargon of the trial; but all my life I had tried to turn life into fiction, to hold reality away; always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening and giving me marks for good or bad behavior—a god like a novelist, to whom I turned, like a character with the power to please, the sensitivity to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to whatever he believed the novelist-god wanted. This leechlike variation of the superego I had created myself, fostered myself, and because of it I had always been incapable of acting freely. It was not my defense; but my despot. And now I saw it, I saw it a death too late.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“He probably knew that any man she took up with now would only pay in pain for what had happened between her and Eugene; the brutal logic of wronged lovers taking their revenge on innocents and outsiders.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy & Epilogue [The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, Girls in their married bliss].