On Stories

"In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive. Whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how to do it, so that at last either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the bird to its own country," I cannot say. But I think it is sometimes done in stories.

—C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Fairy Stories p20.