Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading opens up endless possibilities and experiences through the stories of others.
This quote by Louis L'Amour highlights the transformative power of reading, suggesting that through literature—be it fiction, biography, or history—individuals can explore countless lives and experiences that expand their understanding of the world. It emphasizes that books allow readers to live vicariously through diverse characters and real historical figures, thus enriching their own lives with the wisdom and experiences found in these narratives.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a school presentation about the importance of reading, this quote could highlight the benefits of engaging with different texts.
More from Louis L'Amour
All quotes →One who returns to a place sees it with new eyes. Although the place may not have changed, the viewer inevitably has. For the first time things invisible before become suddenly visible.
Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.
If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter.
Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.
Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.
Similar quotes
When we talk about books, we rarely talk about the economic side of writing, especially of writing literary works, and that, at base, it's a pretty costly enterprise.
Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.
To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.
I cannot start a story or chapter without knowing how it ends. ... Of course, it rarely ends that way.
Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.
My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.