I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children's literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance - I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something.
Interpretation
Reading across genres enriches knowledge and satisfies diverse needs.
In this quote, Jesmyn Ward expresses her passion for reading a variety of genres, highlighting that each one provides unique insights and fulfills different emotional or intellectual needs. This illustrates the importance of diverse literature in personal growth and learning.
In practice
During a literature class, to inspire students to explore various genres.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
Because human development is the most specific and exalted mission of woman, studies in anthropology and theory of pedagogy are essential in girls' education.
High school is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship - nor, contrary to popular belief, an anarchic state. High school is a divine-right monarchy. And when the queen goes on vacation, things change.
If you have children, you cannot feed them forever with flags for breakfast and cartridges for lunch. You need something more substantial. Unless you educate your children and spend less money on conflicts, unless you develop your science, technology and industry, you don't have a future.
Better guide the young than reclaim them when old For the voice of true wisdom is calling "To rescue the fallen is good, but tis best To prevent other people from falling" Better close up the source of temptation and crime Than deliver from dungeon or gallery Better put a strong fence round the top of the cliff Than an ambulance down in the valley.
I feel it is now my duty to speak to young women, to encourage them to have careers and, particularly, careers in science.
But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.
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