Don't worry about how pretty (the story) sounds, how lilting it is, and the imagery, and the metaphor, all that. Most readers don't care. It's the people in your book that matter.
Terry McmillanRead
Let me put it this way: when I read, I learned the world was not as small as my house. And that everybody in my home town was not representative of the way people in the world were raised. And that was what saved me.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how reading expands one's understanding of the world beyond their immediate surroundings.
Terry McMillan emphasizes the transformative power of reading in her quote, illustrating how literature allowed her to perceive the vast diversity of life experiences beyond her hometown. By revealing the broader spectrum of human existence, reading provided her with a sense of salvation, suggesting that increased awareness and understanding can lead to personal growth and liberation from narrow perspectives.
In practice
During a literacy event to inspire children, I could use this quote to show them how books can open up their understanding of the world.
Don't worry about how pretty (the story) sounds, how lilting it is, and the imagery, and the metaphor, all that. Most readers don't care. It's the people in your book that matter.
Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
If we as a nation are to break the cycle of poverty, crime and the growing underclass of young people ill equipped to be productive citizens, we need to not only implement effective programs to prevent teen pregnancy, but we must also help those who have already given birth so that they become effective, nurturing, bonding parents.
Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves.
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what's possible.
We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.
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