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.
I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.
I learn something not because I have to, but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to, not because I have to bring bread back home.
A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.
Racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional.....All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting such discrimination must yield to this principle.
The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.
Educating the world's poorest girls can only be done with the firm commitment of many stakeholders - both domestic and international - to plan, fund, and build strong, sustainable, and equitable education systems.
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