It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading is an active and personal performance that engages the reader's imagination and emotions.
Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes the active role of readers in the process of reading, likening it to a performance where imagination plays a crucial part. Through the act of reading, individuals create their own private interpretations and experience the narrative in a deeply personal and unique way, much like a silent performance that reverberates within their minds.
Themes
ReadingPerformanceImaginationSilenceInner EarTheater
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of literacy, one might quote Le Guin to illustrate the depth of engagement in reading.
More from Ursula K. Le Guin
All quotes →In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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