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.
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.
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Some people seem to think that good dancers are born, but all the good dancers I have known are taught or trained.
Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
The important outcomes of schooling include not only the acquisition of new conceptual tools, refined sensibilities, a developed imagination, and new routines and techniques, but also new attitudes and dispositions. The disposition to continue to learn throughout life is perhaps one of the most important contributions that schools can make to an individual's development.
I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools (in America) that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn't there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.