If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
John UpdikeRead
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Books can shape who we are and how we see ourselves.
John Updike suggests that for many individuals, books are not just sources of entertainment or information, but are deeply intertwined with their personal identities. They can influence our thoughts, beliefs, and values, becoming essential elements in the narrative of who we are as individuals.
Themes
BooksIdentitySelfPersonalReading
In practice
Example use cases
During a book club meeting, one might say this quote to highlight the importance of literature in their lives.
More from John Updike
All quotes βDost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. _x000D_ _x000D_ Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
John UpdikeRead
Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
John UpdikeRead
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
John UpdikeRead
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
John UpdikeRead
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
John UpdikeRead
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Although the teachers or the students are not the same, the person in charge of education is being formed or re-formed as he/she teaches, and the person who is being taught forms him/herself in the process. ...There is, in fact, no teaching without learning.
Paulo FreireRead
The enemies of a people are those who keep them in ignorance.
Thomas SankaraRead
Be convinced that, if man were able to reach the end without preparatory studies, such studies would not be preparatory but tiresome and utterly superfluous.
MaimonidesRead
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
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We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.
Shane ClaiborneRead
Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.
Dorothy ParkerRead