In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Learning to read is a transformative experience that shapes one's understanding of the world.
In this quote, Mario Vargas Llosa reflects on the profound impact that learning to read at a young age had on his life. He emphasizes how this skill opened up a new world of imagination and knowledge, allowing him to transcend physical boundaries and time, ultimately enriching his existence and shaping his perspective over the decades.
Themes
ReadingEducationLiteracyImaginationTransformation
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of education, this quote can be used to highlight the transformative power of reading.
More from Mario Vargas Llosa
All quotes →I think if you're impregnated with good literature, with good culture, you're much more difficult to manipulate, and you're much more aware of the dangers that powers represent.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to have an adventurous life. But my best adventures are more literary than political.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
I don't want to finish my life not being alive. I think that is the saddest thing that can happen to a person. I want to keep living to the end.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it's a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn't know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot - fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration.
Mario Vargas LlosaRead
Similar quotes
It is important that we discover an educational method where people learn to learn and go on learning their whole lives
Rudolf SteinerRead
A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.
Oswald ChambersRead
One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having your say on the subject. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it.
Hunter S. ThompsonRead
To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.
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The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books.
Henry Wadsworth LongfellowRead
So few grow, because so few study.
Dwight L. MoodyRead