Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
Interpretation
Reading allows individuals to escape from reality and immerse themselves in different worlds, often seen as a healthier option for disassociation than drugs.
This quote by Mary Karr suggests that reading provides a deep form of escapism that can temporarily detach individuals from their reality. It highlights the power of literature to transport readers to different realms, serving as a more beneficial and accessible alternative to substance abuse for coping with life's challenges.
In practice
In a book club discussion about the therapeutic effects of reading.
There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.
Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.
My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.
The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
Bookstores should be located not only on campuses or on main drags, but at the assembly plant's gates, also.
I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I was just not interested in thinking about it.
Studying entrepreneurshi p without doing it... is like studying the appreciation of music without listening to it.
I started studying in '85 and got knowledge of self and started spitting. What was going on was taking the understanding of what I was reading and applying it with my life and applying it with my rhymes.
Play is really the work of childhood.
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