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 learnt to read when I was five, and I think that is the most important thing that happened to me.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Learning to read is a foundational skill that can change one's life.
In this quote, Mario Vargas Llosa emphasizes the profound impact that learning to read at an early age has had on his life. He suggests that this fundamental skill opened up countless opportunities for knowledge, understanding, and personal growth, framing it as a pivotal moment in his childhood that shaped his future.
Themes
ReadingEducationImportanceSkillsGrowth
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech at a literacy program, one could say: 'As Mario Vargas Llosa noted, learning to read is one of the most crucial steps in our lives.'
More from Mario Vargas Llosa
All quotes βI 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
Compulsory education... It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise, β but above all β by example.
John RuskinRead
The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.
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There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why.
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The foundations of any subject may be taught to anybody at any age in some form.
Jerome BrunerRead
We in the media have been guilty about not doing a better job of making people understand how really simple cooking is. We've made everyone feel like they have to be a chef.
Ruth ReichlRead
Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and endβas if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.
John BerendtRead