If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.
Katherine PatersonRead
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading is a collaborative process that requires reader engagement and creativity.
This quote by Katherine Paterson emphasizes the importance of active participation in reading. It suggests that simply decoding the text is not enough; a reader must also bring their life experiences and imagination to truly understand and appreciate the story being told. Without a reader's engagement, the written words remain meaningless symbols on a page.
Themes
ReadingImaginationCollaborationExperienceLiterature
In practice
Example use cases
During a reading workshop, you can use this quote to highlight the importance of interaction with the text.
More from Katherine Paterson
All quotes →It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.
Katherine PatersonRead
She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.
Katherine PatersonRead
Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.
Katherine PatersonRead
We are trying to communicate that which lies in our deepest heart, which has no words, which can only be hinted at through the means of a story. And somehow, miraculously, a story that comes from deep in my heart calls from a reader that which is deepest in his or her heart, and together from our secret hidden selves we create a story that neither of us could have told alone.
Katherine PatersonRead
The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.
Katherine PatersonRead
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My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.
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