To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Interpretation
Reading books profoundly influences our lives by providing new experiences.
In this quote, Jonathan Franzen emphasizes the transformative power of reading, suggesting that each book we encounter contributes to our personal growth and life experiences. He reflects on how, from a young age, literature shaped his understanding of the world and himself, exemplified by his early encounter with a biography that inspired him significantly.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literacy, one might quote Franzen to illustrate how reading can positively impact life experiences.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person - a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people - I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.
Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime ministers have never yet been invested.
Learning to see the structures within which we operate begins a process of freeing ourselves from previously unseen forces and ultimately mastering the ability to work with them and change them.
Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.
I went out of my way to play games I didn't like or find interesting. Those ended up being a lot more informative for me. At home, I have literally thousands of games, and I think of them as pearls of wisdom from my predecessors.
Education from the lowest to the highest form must have for its object the training of the individual so that, in seeking the fullest satisfaction of his own nature, he will harmoniously perform his function as a member of a corporate society.
All that being a college coach has done, is it's reaffirmed the need to take care of our young people. They're the ones that are going to make a difference. We spend a lot of time blaming them for stuff, and not enough time mentoring them and helping them stand on their own two feet.
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