The book become almost human

Every writer is surprised a new how, once a book has detached himself from him, it goes on to live a life of its own; it is to him as though a part of an insect had come free and was now going its own way. Perhaps he almost forgets it, perhaps he raises himself above the views he has set down in it, perhaps he no longer even understands it and has lost those wings upon which he flew when he thought out that book: during which time it seeks out its readers, enkindles life, makes happy, terrifies, engenders new works, becomes the conscience of new designs and undertakings - in short, it lives like a being furnished with nature and essence and is yet not human. - That author has drawn the happiest lot who as an old man can say that all of life-engendering, strength-ening, elevating, enlightening thought and feeling that was in him lives on in his writings, and that he himself is now nothing but the grey ashes, while the fire has everywhere been rescued and borne forward. - If one now goes on to consider that, not only a book, but every action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen, one comes to recognize the existence of an actual immortality, that of motion: what has once moved is enclosed and eternalized in the total union of all being like an insect in amber.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900