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.
Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.
Surely education has no meaning unless it helps you understand the vast experience of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a good job, but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid?
You may speak but a word to a child, and in that child there may be slumbering a noble heart which shall stir the Christian Church in years to come.
Adults, who outnumber kids four or five to one, are in charge. We wield the resources, run the world, and completely thwart kids' creativity.
I would tell him that shoot me but first listen to me. And I would tell him that education is my right and education is the right of your daughter and son a well. And I'm speaking up for them. I'm speaking up for peace.
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