Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but
still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is
scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang
there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked
up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are
not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of
suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material
things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
--Virginia Woolf
