The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Interpretation
Writers create books as a means of releasing thoughts, while readers engage with books to retain knowledge and experience.
This quote by Thomas Wolfe highlights the dual purpose of writing and reading. For writers, the act of creating a book can serve as a cathartic process, allowing them to distance themselves from their thoughts or experiences once they are set down on paper. Conversely, readers approach books with the intention of absorbing and remembering the insights, tales, and lessons that the writer has shared, underscoring the transformative power of literature in shaping our understanding and reflection on the world.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a literature class to discuss the purpose of writing and reading.
My dear, dear girl [. . .] we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron--which we cannot get back.
Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know β the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to beβ¦. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.
The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart....To go alone...into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth--it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
Open your mind to what I shall disclose, and hold it fast within you; he who hears, but does not hold what he has heard, learns nothing. Beatrice - Canto V 40-42
Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!
Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them - all of these further a child's brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months.
It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.
You will be astonished to find how the whole mental disposition of your children changes with advancing years. A young child and the same when nearly grown, sometimes differ almost as much as do a caterpillar and butterfly.
In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding.
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