That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.
Dorianne LauxRead
Moon In the Window I wish I could say I was the kind of child who watched the moon from her window, would turn toward it and wonder. I never wondered. I read. Dark signs that crawled toward the edge of the page. It took me years to grow a heart from paper and glue. All I had was a flashlight, bright as the moon, a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on a childhood spent absorbed in reading, contrasting a lack of wonder with a profound emotional growth that comes from literature.
In this poignant reflection, the speaker reminisces about their childhood, revealing a contrast between yearning for the wonder of the moon and their immersive reading habits. While other children may gaze at the moon in awe, this individual lost themselves in the pages of books, ultimately transforming their experiences and feelings into something deeply meaningful. The metaphor of growing a heart from 'paper and glue' artfully illustrates the idea that literature and creativity can give rise to emotional depth and understanding, illuminating the power of stories and imagination in shaping one's inner world.
Themes
ReadingImaginationChildhoodGrowthEmotion
In practice
Example use cases
During a school presentation on the importance of reading and imagination.
More from Dorianne Laux
All quotes →Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence. There are windchimes and the smell of lemons, some days it rains, but more often the air is dry and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase built from hair and bone and listen to the voices of the living. I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair, especially when they fight, and when they sing.
Dorianne LauxRead
How not to imagine the tumors ripening beneath his skin, flesh I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips, pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights so hard I thought I could enter him, open his back at the spine like a door or a curtain and slip in like a small fish between his ribs, nudge the coral of his brains with my lips, brushing over the blue coil of his bowels with the fluted silk of my tail.
Dorianne LauxRead
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