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We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.
Anna Quindlen
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Reading combines the reality of life with the imagination of dreams.

In this quote, Anna Quindlen expresses the unique experience of reading as a bridge between reality and dreams. It suggests that when we read, we enter an alternate reality that allows us to explore our thoughts and feelings through the perspectives of others, making the act of reading a deeply personal and immersive experience that enhances our understanding of life.

Themes

ReadingDreamingConsciousnessLifeMind

In practice

Example use cases

In a book club discussion, you could express how reading transports you to different worlds.

More from Anna Quindlen

The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
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The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
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I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
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With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
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Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
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I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
Anna QuindlenRead

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A little wisdom, now and then

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Quote by Anna Quindlen | QuoteProject