When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.
Garrison KeillorRead
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
Interpretation
Books provide endless knowledge and joy, allowing readers to revisit them anytime.
This quote emphasizes the unique nature of books as gifts that keep on giving. Unlike physical gifts that may be used only once, a book offers infinite opportunities for learning and enjoyment through repeated reading, making it a valuable and timeless present.
In practice
During a book fair, one might say this quote to promote the importance of reading.
When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.
Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.
I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.
When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
It is the power of words and books - explaining and dramatizing great ideas and articulating high ideals - that is the greatest weapon in the missionary's arsenal.
Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?
You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.
You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.
We must clearly understand that when we give the child freedom and independence, we are giving freedom to a worker already braced for action, who cannot live without working and being active.
The competitions between fiction and nonfiction, short and long, electronic and paper, are not battles in which there can be only one victor. After all, we exist in a world where more kinds of writing than ever are greeted with interest and enthusiasm.
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