'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.
Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.
There's no such thing as knowledge management;_x000D_ _x000D_ there are only knowledgeable people._x000D_ _x000D_ Information only becomes knowledge_x000D_ _x000D_ in the hands of someone_x000D_ _x000D_ who knows what to do with it.
Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories.
All wish to possess knowledge, but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price.
Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.
What I wanted to do was use literature and different kinds of stories and poems as a springboard, tapping into the creativity of our teens - I wanted teenagers to come up with their own creative responses to literature - using books themselves as a starting point.
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