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.
Every lecture should state one main point and repeat it over and over, like a theme with variations. An audience is like a herd of cows, moving slowly in the direction they are being driven towards. If we make one point, we have a good chance that the audience will take the right direction; if we make several points, then the cows will scatter all over the field. The audience will lose interest and everyone will go back to the thoughts they interrupted in order to come to our lecture.
The extreme sophistication of modern technology - wonderful though its benefits are - is, ironically, an impediment to engaging young people with basics: with learning how things work.
How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.
To educate girls is to reduce poverty.
Let's face it: Most of us don't realize it, but we are failing our kids as reading role models. The best role models are in the home: brothers, fathers, grandfathers; mothers, sisters, grandmothers. Moms and dads, it's important that your kids see you reading. Not just books - reading the newspaper is good, too.
The door available to everyone that can lead to happiness & success is the modest door of the public library. I found it to be so in my own life and work.
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