Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
Louis L'AmourRead
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading opens up endless possibilities and experiences through the stories of others.
This quote by Louis L'Amour highlights the transformative power of reading, suggesting that through literature—be it fiction, biography, or history—individuals can explore countless lives and experiences that expand their understanding of the world. It emphasizes that books allow readers to live vicariously through diverse characters and real historical figures, thus enriching their own lives with the wisdom and experiences found in these narratives.
Themes
ReadingBooksEducationExperienceLiteratureImagination
In practice
Example use cases
In a school presentation about the importance of reading, this quote could highlight the benefits of engaging with different texts.
More from Louis L'Amour
All quotes →One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible.
Louis L'AmourRead
Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.
Louis L'AmourRead
If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter.
Louis L'AmourRead
Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.
Louis L'AmourRead
Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.
Louis L'AmourRead
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Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
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As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.
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All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
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Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
Jhumpa LahiriRead
There were epochs in the history of humanity in which the writer was a sacred person. He wrote the sacred books, universal books, the codes, the epic, the oracles. Sentences inscribed on the walls of the crypts; examples in the portals of the temples. But in those times the writer was not an individual alone; he was the people.
Augusto Roa BastosRead