When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the value of written communication over modern conveniences such as phone calls.
In this quote, Paul Theroux reflects on his experiences in Africa during a time when he was disconnected from immediate communication technologies like phones. His decision to write letters and literary works instead emphasizes the richness of the written word and the depth of thought and creativity that comes from taking the time to express oneself through writing, despite the lack of modern communication methods.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of storytelling, this quote can illustrate how powerful writing can be.
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.
I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they’ve made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.
Travel is rich with learning opportunities, and the ultimate sourvenir is a broader perspective.
Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange
Learning through the arts reinforces critical academic skills in reading, language arts and math, and provides students with the skills to creatively solve problems.
The only condition a library asks its users to honor is to do justice to their own imagination, their own curiosity and their own thirst for knowledge, and in the process, to achieve their own independence of mind and spirit.
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