Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.
Interpretation
Reading can greatly influence emotions and perceptions, akin to the effects of a drug.
In this quote, Richard Wright expresses how deeply literature affects him. He compares the immersive experience of reading to a drug, indicating that novels can create emotional states that linger long after the pages have been turned. This highlights the power of literature to shape our feelings and imagination, showing that reading is not just a passive activity, but an active engagement with our inner lives.
In practice
In a book club meeting discussing how literature can evoke strong emotions.
It had been only through books-at best, no more than vicarious cultural transfusions-that I had managaed to keep myself alive in a negatively vital way. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.
I was not leaving the south to forget the south, but so that some day I might understand it
Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.
He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.
It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.
I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.
The written word endures, the spoken word disappears
I listened more than I studied... therefore little by little my knowledge and ability were developed.
Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
If you are in a country that is progressive, the woman is progressive. If you're in a country that reflects the consciousness toward the importance of education, it's because the woman is aware of the importance of education. But in every backward country you'll find the women are backward, and in every country where education is not stressed its because the women don't have education.
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