I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie. - James Branch Cabell

The purblind majority quite honestly believed that literature was meant to mimic human life, and that it did so. And in consequence, their love-affairs, their maxims, their so-called natural ties and instincts, and above all, their wickedness, became just so many bungling plagiarisms from something they had read, in a novel or a Bible or a poem or a newspaper. People progressed from the kindergarten to the cemetery assuming that their emotion at every crisis was what books taught them was the appropriate emotion, and without noticing that it was in reality something quite different. Human life was a distorting tarnished mirror held up to literature: this much at least of Wilde's old paradox — that life mimicked art — was indisputable. Human life, very clumsily, tried to reproduce the printed word.

But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating
conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.

The Terrible and Marvellous History of Manuel Pig-Tender That Afterwards Was Named Manuel the Redeemer.