Maybe reading was just a way to make her feel less alone, to keep her company. When you read something you are stopped, the moment is stayed, you can sometimes be there more fully than you can in your real life.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes how reading can provide comfort and companionship, allowing a deeper experience than real life.
In this quote, Helen Humphreys suggests that reading serves as a refuge from loneliness, offering warmth and connection to the reader. It highlights that literature has the power to capture a moment and create an immersive experience, often allowing readers to engage more fully with their emotions and thoughts than in everyday life.
In practice
During a book club meeting to illustrate the emotional power of literature.
Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.
Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.
The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.
I believe that if we want our children to understand the world beyond their classroom, we must bring the world into their classroom.
Where one man reads the Bible, a hundred read you and me.
I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like.
Here's the thing: If you don't want your kids to read a book, fine. You can tell them not to read a book, and maybe they will and maybe they won't. But you can't say what other kids can read.
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