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.
My hunch is that if we allow ourselves to give who we really are to the children in our care, we will in some way inspire cartwheels in their hearts.
My Head of House said I lacked certain necessary qualities...like the ability to behave myself.
The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.
Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.
Whatβs strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature.
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
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