Extraordinary people excite; they guide; they warn; standing, as they do, in the corridors of imagination — statues of greatness, personifications of marvel and sorrow — they help us carry what comes to us as it came to them. They give our lives an imaginary dimension. That's what we look for when buying biographies and reading the secret intimacies of the famous, their luck, their errors, their gossip. Not to pull them down to our level, but to lift ours, making our world less impossible through familiarity with theirs.
— James Hillman, The Soul's Code