We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something--make something--with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.
Patricia HamplRead
If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Books require discussion and critique to remain vibrant and engaging.
Patricia Hampl emphasizes the importance of dialogue and engagement in literature. She argues that without discussions, reviews, and critiques, literature loses its dynamism and intimacy, becoming merely a series of written words rather than a living conversation. Reviews serve to create a community around reading, turning it into an interactive experience where readers are participants rather than passive observers.
Themes
LiteratureDiscussionReviewReadingIntimacy
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club meeting, one could say, 'As Patricia Hampl noted, the dialogue around books is what keeps literature alive and engaging.'
More from Patricia Hampl
All quotes →Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.
Patricia HamplRead
Similar quotes
We look at science as something very elite, which only a few people can learn. That's just not true. You just have to start early and give kids a foundation. Kids live up, or down, to expectations.
Mae JemisonRead
A university is not, thank heavens, a place for vocational instruction, it has nothing to do with training for a working life and career, it is a place for education, something quite different.
Stephen FryRead
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets — no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
Philip RothRead
There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us.
Mary BeardRead
I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe.
Madeleine L'EngleRead
Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.
Roger SchankRead