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Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Carlos Fuentes
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Literature enriches our lives by providing diverse experiences and perspectives beyond our own.

Carlos Fuentes highlights the transformative power of literature, suggesting that it surpasses history by offering readers multiple lives and experiences that enhance their understanding of the world. Through literature, individuals can explore various narratives and viewpoints, ultimately broadening their horizons and opening up new possibilities in life.

Themes

LiteratureExperienceOpportunitiesReadingImagination

In practice

Example use cases

During a book club meeting discussing the impacts of literature on personal growth.

More from Carlos Fuentes

The possibility of being as free with the camera as we are with the pen is a fantastic prospect for the creative life of the 21st century.
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Writing is a struggle against silence.
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One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.
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No, it's not that they're bad. It's that they're obliged to pretend they're good. They've been brought up to deceive and be cunning, to protect themselves from our society. I don't want to be like that.
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You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.
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What's happened at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is one of the grossest violations of human rights under the Geneva Conventions that we have record of. It is simply monstrous.
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