In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
I learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Learning to read is a foundational skill that can change one's life.
In this quote, Mario Vargas Llosa emphasizes the profound impact that learning to read at an early age has had on his life. He suggests that this fundamental skill opened up countless opportunities for knowledge, understanding, and personal growth, framing it as a pivotal moment in his childhood that shaped his future.
Themes
ReadingEducationImportanceSkillsGrowth
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech at a literacy program, one could say: 'As Mario Vargas Llosa noted, learning to read is one of the most crucial steps in our lives.'
More from Mario Vargas Llosa
All quotes βI think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
I don't want to finish my life not being alive. I think that is the saddest thing that can happen to a person. I want to keep living to the end.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it's a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn't know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot - fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
Similar quotes
Libraries really are the gates to the future.
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Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.
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You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.
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The old lessons (work, self-discipline, sacrifice, teamwork, fighting to achieve) aren't being taught by many people other than football coaches these days. The football coach has a captive audience and can teach these lessons because the communication lines between himself and his players are more wide open than between kids and parents. We better teach these lessons or else the country's future population will be made up of a majority of crooks, drug addicts, or people on relief.
Bear BryantRead
Our aim is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his innermost core.
Maria MontessoriRead
There is no cost difference between incarceration and an Ivy League education; the main difference is curriculum.
Paul HawkenRead