Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).
Interpretation
Reading should be a joyous experience, and if it isn't, it's okay to take a break.
William Maxwell emphasizes the importance of enjoying the act of reading. If a book does not bring joy or engagement, he suggests it's perfectly acceptable to put it aside rather than forcing oneself to continue, illustrating that reading should be a pleasurable escape rather than a chore.
In practice
During a book club meeting to discuss the importance of enjoying literature.
Sometimes she goes out to work as a practical nurse, and comes home and sits by the kitchen table soaking her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts. When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.
The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters
I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.
If you turn the imagination loose like a hunting dog, it will often return with the bird in its mouth.
A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.
We inculcate young people with the message that if they don't succeed, it is merely of their own doing. They should have worked harder, we say. They should have made better decisions. This message is especially present in communities of color.
I sat down in 1989 and I made up my mind at that point that I was going to spend the rest of my life assisting women and youth to gain social and political empowerment through business and education. I convinced myself economic empowerment of women was going to be key, especially in a country like this where most women didn't go to school.
Besides language and music, it [mathematics] is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind, and it is the universal organ for world understanding through theoretical construction. Mathematics must therefore remain an essential element of the knowledge and abilities which we have to teach, of the culture we have to transmit, to the next generation.
If you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way.
The library is not only a diary of the human race, but marks an act of faith in the continuity of humanity.
We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
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