A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
Interpretation
A powerful book immerses the reader in diverse experiences, making them feel as if they have lived multiple lives.
William Styron articulates the transformative power of literature, suggesting that a truly great book not only entertains but also enriches the reader's life by offering deep, varied experiences. The act of reading should be an engaging journey that leaves one feeling a sense of fulfillment and emotional fatigue, akin to living through multiple lifetimes.
In practice
During a book club meeting discussing the latest novel.
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.
As a kid I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays and I would walk home at night. For several years I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.
If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.
Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
Praise your kids. Inspire and motivate your players with praise. Ten years from now it won't matter what your record was. Will your kids love you or hate you?
In this time of extraordinary pressure, educational and social, perhaps a motherβs first duty to her children is to secure for them a quiet and growing time, a full six years of passive receptive life, the waking part of it for the most part spent out in the fresh air.
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