Susan Sontag on the importance of literature

One of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experience of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies and defends the glories of language (that is, expands the basic instrument of consciousness): namely, literature.