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.
When I learn something new - and it happens every day - I feel a little more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest.
Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn
You have to dream. We all have to dream. Dreaming is OK. Imagine me teaching from space, all over the world, touching so many peoples lives. Thats a teachers dream! I have a vision of the world as a global village, a world without boundaries. Imagine a history teacher making history!
We teach children to save their money. As an attempt to counteract thoughtless and selfish expenditure, that has value. But it is not positive; it does not lead the child into the safe and useful avenues of self-expression or self-expenditure. To teach a child to invest and use is better than to teach him to save.
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
Although I'm not actually embarrassed by this, I tend not to read books that have awesome movies made from them, regardless of how well or badly the movie represented the actual written story.
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