If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the potential loss of physical books and their unique qualities if they become extinct.
John Updike's quote expresses a deep sense of nostalgia and concern for the potential disappearance of physical books. He suggests that if paper books were to vanish like earlier forms of written material, society would lose invaluable aspects of the reading experience, such as the tactile sensation of turning pages, the permanence of print, and the intimate connection readers often feel with a physical book. Updike emphasizes that the loss of these elements would carry significant cultural and emotional implications.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of preserving literature, one could reference this quote to highlight the significance of physical books.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
Similar quotes
Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
Books--oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings." "I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.
Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.
Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque.