'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the emotional impact of reading and understanding literature, particularly how it connects words to feelings.
In this quote, Meg Wolitzer shares a personal memory of reading 'Charlotte's Web' as a child, which marked a transformative moment for her. Sitting on her mother's lap, she transitioned from merely learning to untangle words to comprehending how literature expresses profound emotions. This experience highlights the powerful role that reading plays in developing empathy and emotional understanding through storytelling.
In practice
This quote could be used during a children's literacy event to emphasize the importance of reading.
You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.
I think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it's weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.
And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.
I feel like, in a lot of ways, 'Hidden Figures' is the book that I wrote and have been waiting to read since I learned to read.
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.
The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading; every man that tries it finds it so. But a great book that comes from a great thinker, — it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth, with beauty too.
With the states release today of a set of clear and consistent academic standards, our nation is one step closer to supporting effective teaching in every classroom, charting a path to college and careers for all students, and developing the tools to help all children stay motivated and engaged in their own education. The more states that adopt these college and career based standards, the closer we will be to sharing innovation across state borders and becoming more competitive as a country.
Adult helplessness destroys children. Or it forces them to become tiny adults of their own.
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
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