A Quote by Laura Miller
Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?
Related Quotes
I have books I like very much, but I don't think there are any books that everyone should read. I prefer a world in which some people read this, and others read that.
There is the physical world that we live in, which we perceive through the senses, but there are other worlds. Right in front of you there are other worlds, right now. Those worlds are as real, if you will, as the physical world.
My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don't read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children's rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent's rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says 'PRIVATE--GROWNUPS KEEP OUT': a child sprawled on the bed, reading.
I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans.... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world.
While books expand horizons by exposing us to worlds outside our own, children also need to see themselves, their experiences and their cultures reflected in books they read. Unfortunately, for too many children, this is not the norm.
When I would sell encyclopedias, I would drive down the road looking for a house with a swing set in the back, and I'd say, "Oh, those folks got kids. They need some books." I'd knock on their door and sell them a set of encyclopedias, and those books were from $300 to $600. I'd look around the house, and if there wasn't that much furniture in the house, I felt a little bad about selling a $600 set of books to people who couldn't afford a couch. So I didn't last at that job very long.
I don't think anything ever "needs" to happen. I don't think it's more positive to have a Twitter account, a Tumblr, and a blog. Someone without those things will use their time to do other things, like read books or swim or talk to their children or read websites or listen to music or write books or lie in bed or sit in a chair. I don't think any of these things are more positive than any other things.
The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — 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 be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.
I believe that hunger for a 'lost dimension' of experience is a natural yearning in all of us, and it doesn't go away just because we ignore it. It is evidenced among other places in the millions of children and adults who obsessively read the 'Harry Potter' books. It is said that fiction is where someone gets to tell the truth.
Creativity is not simply originality and unlimited freedom. There is much more to it than that. Creativity also imposes restrictions. While it uses methods other than those of ordinary thinking, it must not be in disagreement with ordinary thinking-or rather, it must be something that, sooner or later, ordinary thinking will understand, accept, and appreciate. Otherwise the result would be bizarre, not creative.
Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don't read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.
I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me.
Having spent so much time in a fictional world, I prefer to read about the real world
Having spent so much time in a fictional world, I prefer to read about the real world.
One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'
I pledge to set out to live a thousand lives between printed pages. I pledge to use books as doors to other minds, old and young, girl and boy, man and animal. I pledge to use books to open windows to a thousand different worlds and to the thousand different faces of my own world. I pledge to use books to make my universe spread much wider than the world I live in every day. I pledge to treat my books like friends, visiting them all from time to time and keeping them close.
Related Authors
Alexander Hamilton Quotes
American
Politician
Benjamin Franklin Quotes
American
Politician
Bernie Sanders Quotes
American
Politician
David Brooks Quotes
American
Politician
Hillary Clinton Quotes
American
Politician
Jill Stein Quotes
American
Politician
John F. Kerry Quotes
American
Politician
John McCain Quotes
American
Politician
Marco Rubio Quotes
American
Politician
Mitt Romney Quotes
American
Politician
Narendra Modi Quotes
Indian
Politician
Newt Gingrich Quotes
American
Politician
Paul Ryan Quotes
American
Politician
Rand Paul Quotes
American
Politician
Ron Paul Quotes
American
Politician
Ted Cruz Quotes
American
Politician