This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.
Interpretation
The quote illustrates the struggle of a girl using a story to escape from her troubled thoughts.
In this quote, the protagonist finds solace in a fairy tale while facing overwhelming emotions and thoughts. The imagery of shivering under the covers with an overdue library book represents the desire for comfort and escape, while the 'fence' created by the sentences signifies a protective barrier from her internal fears and anxieties. This encapsulates the therapeutic power of literature in coping with life's challenges.
In practice
In a discussion about how literature helps in coping with stress, this quote beautifully captures that sentiment.
Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can’t let go of the past.
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids.
A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.
I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.
If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.
Write about the emotions you fear the most.
Starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags , we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.
You don't cheat anybody out of their experience, whatever it is.
Gilbert darling, don't let's ever be afraid of things. It's such dreadful slavery. Let's be daring and adventurous and expectant. Let's dance to meet life and all it can bring to us, even if it brings scads of trouble and typhoid and twins!" (Anne to Gilbert)
Live well, learn plenty, laugh often, love much.
We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.
Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.
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