The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
Anna QuindlenRead
How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the timeless impact of literature on human experience, bridging reality and imagination.
Anna Quindlen highlights the enduring influence of Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' over the centuries, suggesting that literature allows readers to transcend societal norms and connect with deeper human experiences. She emphasizes the power of reading, which serves as a form of escapism that merges life with dreaming, offering profound insights into the human condition through the lens of another's thoughts.
Themes
LiteratureReadingImaginationJane AustenPride And Prejudice
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote during a literary discussion about the timelessness of classic novels.
More from Anna Quindlen
All quotes →The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
Anna QuindlenRead
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
Anna QuindlenRead
With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
Anna QuindlenRead
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
Anna QuindlenRead
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
Anna QuindlenRead
Similar quotes
As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonRead
It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
Gore VidalRead
If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.
Anthony DoerrRead
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
Gaston BachelardRead
Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.
Stephen KingRead