I find it to be a bit of a faux pas to share just a single line from a novel. Fiction doesn’t work like non-fiction, where every paragraph should be built to stand alone. A great line in fiction is like a keystone in an arch, dependent on all the stones around it to stand. Remove it and it loses the support that makes it special.

But there's a line in the book Hopscotch that has been stuck in my head for awhile. Sharing it feels a bit like ripping a baby away from its mother's embracing arms and throwing it into a freezing river of no context. That being said, I'm going to do it anyway.

For light context: the line belongs to a character named La Maga. She's a woman who lives by pure instinct. She believes everything that happens is fate and finds no use in thinking about how things could have been under different circumstances. She is delivering a well-meaning criticism to the main character, her lover Horacio Oliveira. He is an analytical over-thinker who believes that if you can name the gears of a thing, you understand it. He longs to live like La Maga but can't seem to get out of his own way.

She says to him, "You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. [...] You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room."

When I read this, I felt it was the 1960s literary equivalent of a rap battle mic drop where the opponent can't even respond because he's been so owned. But it was more than just a creative diss.

A great fiction book talks to you through its characters. As I spent the previous pages finding common ground with Oliveira, I felt the diss was levied against me as well as him. Now I'm considering: how many rooms have I stood in, describing the paintings, while thinking I was inside them? Where have I narrated instead of lived? What would La Maga say to me?

Getting you to think instead of telling you what to think is how great fiction teaches wisdom. It helps you find your answer rather than giving you one. In other words, non-fiction describes the painting while fiction helps you paint, and I think La Maga would approve.