There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Interpretation
Creative reading enhances understanding and appreciation of literature, just like creative writing expresses originality.
In this quote, Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes the importance of engaging with texts in an imaginative and thoughtful manner. Just as creative writing involves originality and innovation, creative reading encourages readers to interpret and interact with literature in meaningful ways, thereby enhancing their comprehension and enjoyment of the written word.
In practice
A discussion in a literature class about the interpretation of a novel.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife, and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past and make it work for you is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad.
I hope that one day when I'll go back to Pakistan, I will build a university like Harvard.
Reading is rapture (or if it isn't, I put the book down meaning to go on with it later, and escape out the side door).
Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.