She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
Interpretation
Reading opens up a world of understanding and self-awareness.
This quote emphasizes the profound impact that reading can have on an individual’s sense of self and perspective on the world. The speaker credits someone significant for fostering their love of reading, which in turn has enriched their understanding of life’s complexities and cultivated essential traits such as curiosity and empathy. It suggests that through literature, one becomes more attuned to the vibrancy and contradictions of existence, leading to a more fearless engagement with the world.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, I would quote this to highlight the role of reading.
The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what people are saying strikes you as melodramatic or sentimental, and it's hard not to smirk. You have a sense of what this type of situation should be like - for one thing, all-consuming - and this isn't it. But then you look back, and it was that; it did happen.
Sometimes, there can be a slightly condescending assumption that anything unlikable about a female character is a mistake, as if they're a contestant in a beauty pageant and have to seem charming and upbeat all the time.
Is the depressing part that he's only half right - it's not that she doesn't need rescuing but that nobody else will be able to do it? She has always somehow known that she is the one who will have to rescue herself. Or maybe what's depressing is that this knowledge seems like it should make life easier, and instead it makes it harder.
No country can possibly move ahead, no free society can possibly be sustained, unless it has an educated citizenry whose qualities of mind and heart permit it to take part in the complicated and increasingly sophisticated decisions that pour not only upon the President and upon the Congress, but upon all the citizens who exercise the ultimate power.
Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
Creationists who want religious ideas taught as scientific fact in public schools continue to adapt to courtroom defeats by hiding their true aims under ever changing guises.
I didn't really want to be the coach who wins but the coach who educates.
The rich man, when contributing to a permanent plan for the education of the poor, ought to reflect that he is providing for that of his own descendants; and the poor man who concurs in a provision for those who are not poor that at no distant day it may be enjoyed by descendants from himself. It does not require a long life to witness these vicissitudes of fortune.
A man is not learned until he can read, write and swim.
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