One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.
Interpretation
Books offer limitless possibilities for exploration and imagination without cost.
This quote emphasizes the unique power of books in providing readers with the freedom to experience anything they desire, whether it's exploring distant lands, encountering diverse characters, or engaging in profound ideas, all without any financial burden. It suggests that literature opens up infinite opportunities for personal growth and adventure, encouraging a fearless approach to learning and understanding the world.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of reading, one might quote George R. R. Martin to highlight the boundless adventures found in books.
I hate outlines. I have a broad sense of where the story is going; I know the end, I know the end of the principal characters, and I know the major turning points and events from the books, the climaxes for each book, but I don't necessarily know each twist and turn along the way. That's something I discover in the course of writing and that's what makes writing enjoyable. I think if I outlined comprehensively and stuck to the outline the actual writing would be boring.
There is only one god and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: βNot today.
I did not do it. Yet now I wish I had.β He turned to face the hall, that sea of pale faces. βI wish I had enough poison for you all. You make me sorry that I am not the monster you would have me be, yet there it is. I am innocent, but I will get no justice here.
But a voice inside her whispered, There are no heroes, and she remembered what Lord Petyr had said to her, here in this very hall. 'Life is not a song, sweetling,' he'd told her, 'You may learn that one day to your sorrow.' In life, the monsters win, she told herself.
I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.
Once a man has seen a dragon in flight, let him stay home and tend his garden in content, someone had written once, for this wide world has no greater wonder." Tyrion scratched at his scar and tried to recall the author's name.
Times have changed, and science has made great progress, and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed, and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity, only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation.
We believed that to understand literature, you had to understand its place in history and culture.
A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.
Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.
Education is preparation to live completely.
When I'm teaching, I tell my students: It's all process. Don't even think of product.
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