But sometimes, to enable her to bear her life, she needed the accompaniment of an inward music and she could not always compose it for herself. - Boris Pasternak

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime.

Don't let my soul be riddled / by deceit: kill it or, / like fog, it will seep through / a heap of white chaff.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.