'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.
If you're going to binge, literature is definitely the way to do it.
The court generally moves in small steps rather than in one giant step.
We should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit.
To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.
You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
I can create as many programs and mentorships and scholarships as I want, but it doesn't change the environment in which our youth are growing up in.
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