The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
Anna QuindlenRead
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the societal perception that excessive reading may lead to being out of touch with reality.
Anna Quindlen’s quote highlights the irony of how society values reading while simultaneously looking down on those who are deeply engrossed in it. It suggests that there is a cultural stigma attached to readers, perceiving them as disconnected or impractical, rather than recognizing the value of their exploration of ideas and knowledge through literature.
Themes
ReadingSocietyCulturePerceptionLiteratureValues
In practice
Example use cases
During a book club discussion about societal norms regarding literature.
More from Anna Quindlen
All quotes →The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
Anna QuindlenRead
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
Anna QuindlenRead
With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
Anna QuindlenRead
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
Anna QuindlenRead
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
Anna QuindlenRead
Similar quotes
If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge so as continually to be acquiring new, he may be a teacher of others.
ConfuciusRead
Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists
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Education is the civil rights issue of our generation.
Arne DuncanRead
A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)
Neil PostmanRead
The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray BradburyRead
When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.
Mem FoxRead