I'm still a bit of a reading glutton, I think, because I browse, read a bit of the back copy, flip through the book, read a bit of the text, and if it still seems fascinating, I read it. That's why my bedside table is so cluttered: I want to imbibe it all.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a deep love for reading and a desire to absorb knowledge.
Jesmyn Ward expresses her insatiable appetite for reading and knowledge, describing her habit of skimming through books to evaluate their appeal. This enthusiasm leads her to a cluttered bedside table, symbolizing the abundance of literature she wishes to explore and absorb deeply.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of lifelong learning.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.
I quit college so fast I didn't even clean out my locker.
As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit
The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
Don't dumb down; always write for your top five percent of readers.
If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.
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