I look at [books] as a child looks at cakes - with glittering eyes and a watering mouth, imagining the pleasure that awaits him.
Interpretation
The quote compares a child's excitement for cakes to a reader's enthusiasm for books, highlighting the joy and anticipation that books can bring.
In this quote, Elizabeth Gaskell expresses the profound delight and curiosity that books inspire, akin to a child's eager anticipation of enjoying a sweet treat. She captures the essence of reading as an enchanting experience, filled with the promise of pleasure and discovery, much like the intrinsic joy found in enjoying a favorite dessert.
In practice
A teacher could use this quote to inspire students to foster a love for reading.
Neither loss of father, nor loss of mother, dear as she was to Mr Thornton, could have poisoned the remembrance of the weeks, the days, the hours, when a walk of two miles, every step of which was pleasant, as it brought him nearer and nearer to her, took him to her sweet presence - every step of which was rich, as each recurring moment that bore him away from her made him recal some fresh grace in her demeanour, or pleasant pungency in her character.
It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young; afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive." (Mr. Bell)
Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used--not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.
Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life....My precept is, do something, my sister, do good if you can; but at any rate, do something.
Mr. Thornton felt that in this influx no one was speaking to Margaret, and was restless under this apparent neglect. But he never went near her himself; he did not look at her. Only, he knew what she was doing β or not doing β better than anyone else in the room. Margaret was so unconscious of herself, and so much amused by watching other people, that she never thought whether she was left unnoticed or not.
Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.
In the old days... it was a basic, cardinal fact that producers didn't have opinions. When I was producing natural history programmes, I didn't use them as vehicles for my own opinion. They were factual programmes.
That's what I tell my students at California Institute of the Arts where I taught for 27 years. I taught them if you strive to be a good person, maybe you might become a great jazz musician.
I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them.
It appears to me that if one wants to make progress in mathematics, one should study the masters and not the pupils.
And if we want to achieve our goal, then let us empower ourselves with the weapon of knowledge and let us shield ourselves with unity and togetherness.
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