The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.
William H. GassRead
For the speedy reader paragraphs become a country the eye flies over looking for landmarks, reference points, airports, restrooms, passages of sex.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that speedy reading turns text into a landscape where one looks for key information and points of interest.
William H. Gass uses a vivid metaphor to illustrate how rapid reading transforms entire paragraphs into a vast country that readers navigate through. In this country, readers are on the lookout for significant landmarks and reference points that aid in understanding, suggesting that while quick reading may allow for a broad overview, it potentially overlooks deeper meanings and connections that slower, more deliberate reading may reveal.
Themes
ReadingEducationLiteratureSpeedUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
Quotes about reading can be shared at a literary festival to evoke thoughts about the nature of engagement with texts.
More from William H. Gass
All quotes →Of course there is enough to stir our wonder anywhere; there's enough to love, anywhere, if one is strong enough, if one is diligent enough, if one is perceptive, patient, kind enough -- whatever it takes.
William H. GassRead
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
William H. GassRead
So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them
William H. GassRead
Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H. GassRead
I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life
William H. GassRead
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Because you don't learn anything unless you can find the patience to read. TV takes that away from you. It robs you from your mind.
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If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.
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