Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.
Interpretation
Great books have the power to profoundly transform our thoughts and emotions.
This quote by Siri Hustvedt emphasizes the profound impact that certain books can have on readers. Such books do not just entertain; they challenge our perceptions and evoke deep emotional responses, leading to significant personal growth and change.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a discussion on the importance of literature in personal development.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
The idea that computers can ever replace teachers and schools reveals a deep lack of understanding about the role leadership plays in student success.
The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.
Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
Think about being a teenager and feeling like school is just about taking tests you may or may not be interested in, after which someone will judge whether or not you're smart. No one's going to be inspired by that.
To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.
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