– Alexander Solzhenitsyn
What Alexander Solzhenitsyn meant by saying this was that books teach us life lessons that we haven't had the chance to experience yet. Also they take us to fantasy worlds which nobody could experience unless they read that specific book. They can also take us into the past because my book is about a group of people living through the French Revolution and trying to save aristocrats that have been condemned for no reason other than their last name and heritage.
Another thing that he could have meant by saying this statement would be that you don't have to travel into the world, but instead you could just sit at home and read all day and let your mind come up with images that you think that things outside your house would look like. This could have been possibly the beginning of the "Couch Potato". What he states is that literature only substitutes for experience that we have yet to have. This does not mean that we can live off of literature and not experience anything for ourselves.
