Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
“A person who is doing literary writing must deal in emotion-charged symbols – and so you end up writing about things like death and lions and sacramental meals, perhaps because those are emotional things that wake certain feelings in the deep spring of the individual. I’m using it as I have to, to engage and stir the reader’s emotions. And if fiction doesn’t do that, then it’s failed. That’s the purpose of fiction.”
Gene Wolfe