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"Literature helps us grow, both personally and intellectually; it provides an objective base for our understanding; it helps us connect ourselves to a broader cultural, philosophic and religious world of which we are a part; it enables us to recognize human dreams and struggles in different places and times that we would never otherwise know. Literature helps us develop mature sensibility and compassion for the condition of all living things -- human, animal and vegetable; it gives us the knowledge and perception needed to appreciate the beauty of order and arrangement, just as a well-structured song or a beautiful painting can; it provides the comparative basis from which we can see worthiness in the aims of all people, and it therefore helps us see beauty in the world around us; it exercises our emotions through interest, concern, tension, excitement, hope, fear, regret, laughter and sympathy. Through cumulative experience in reading, great literature shapes our goals and values by helping us clarify our own identities, both positively, through acceptance of the admirable in human beings, and negatively, through rejection of the sinister. It helps us shape our judgments through the comparison of the good and the bad. Literature enables us to develop a perspective on the events that occur around us and in the world at large, and thereby it enables us to gain understanding and control. It is one of the shaping influences of life. It helps to make us human." excerpt from Literature: An
Introduction to Reading and Writing, Sec. edition
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