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
As a historically voracious reader - pre-baby, I averaged a book every week or two, and when I was a kid, I'd routinely read a book a day - I never understood how some people could not read. When I heard people say they didn't have time to read, in my head, I simultaneously pitied and ridiculed them: there was always time to read.
Celeste NgRead
Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.
Amy TanRead
Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle.
Judy ChicagoRead
It is those books which a man possesses but does not read which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him.
Victor HugoRead
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.
Barbara TuchmanRead
What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp?
William OslerRead