some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
Jennifer EganRead
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading is crucial for good writing, yet it is increasingly overlooked in our culture.
Jennifer Egan highlights the importance of reading in developing writing skills, emphasizing that a decline in reading culture poses a risk to the quality of writing. In a world where distractions abound and attention to literature wanes, she advocates for a resurgence in reading to cultivate better writers.
Themes
ReadingWritingCultureEducationLiterature
In practice
Example use cases
In a keynote speech on education, I referenced Egan's quote to stress the importance of reading.
More from Jennifer Egan
All quotes βI think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
Jennifer EganRead
I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.
Jennifer EganRead
I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.
Jennifer EganRead
And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
Jennifer EganRead
We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?
Jennifer EganRead
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Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.
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