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.
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now?
Concentration is a part of life. It is not the consequence of a method of education.
Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs.
History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.
Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.
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