What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
Interpretation
A great book immerses you in diverse experiences, leaving you feeling fulfilled yet tired from the journey.
William Styron suggests that reading a great book allows readers to immerse themselves in various experiences and perspectives, making them feel as if they have lived multiple lives. This engagement can be emotionally and mentally exhausting, indicating the depth and richness of the literature that transports readers beyond their own reality.
In practice
Using this quote during a book club meeting to discuss the emotional impact of reading.
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.
Books-bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.
Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.
There is a huge gap between what students want for their future and what their schools are offering.
When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion faster than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em.
I don’t think people realise how vital libraries are or what a colossal danger it would be if we were to lose any more. Having had a truncated school life myself, all of my education from the age of 17 has been self-taught. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for the opportunities the library gave me.
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