Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
“Old Mortality”This is the source of the otherwise-spurious Stevenson quote "Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences" or "Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences."