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.
We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.
It is important for young entrepreneurs to be adequately self-aware to know what they do not know.
You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.
I have been long sensible that while I was endeavoring to render our country the greatest of all services, that of regenerating the public education, and placing our rising generation on the level of our sister states (which they have proudly held heretofore), I was discharging the odious function of a physician pouring medicine down the throat of a patient insensible of needing it.
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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