'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the emotional impact of reading and understanding literature, particularly how it connects words to feelings.
In this quote, Meg Wolitzer shares a personal memory of reading 'Charlotte's Web' as a child, which marked a transformative moment for her. Sitting on her mother's lap, she transitioned from merely learning to untangle words to comprehending how literature expresses profound emotions. This experience highlights the powerful role that reading plays in developing empathy and emotional understanding through storytelling.
In practice
This quote could be used during a children's literacy event to emphasize the importance of reading.
You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.
I think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it's weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.
And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.
A good example is the best sermon.
I do my precalc homework, and then when I'm done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That's the kind of weekend it is--the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.
And once we have given our community a good start,' I pointed out, ' the process will be cumulative. By maintaining a sound system of education you produce citizens of good character, and citizens of sound character, with the advantage of a good education, produce in turn children better than themselves and better able to produce still better children in their turn, as can be seen with animals.
Your understanding of what you read and hear is, to a very large degree, determined by your vocabulary, so improve your vocabulary daily.
We do not learn; and what we call learning is only a process of recollection.
If you're last in your class at Harvard, it doesn't feel like you're a good student, even though you really are. It's not smart for everyone to want to go to a great school.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.