Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
Interpretation
Reading allows individuals to escape from reality and immerse themselves in different worlds, often seen as a healthier option for disassociation than drugs.
This quote by Mary Karr suggests that reading provides a deep form of escapism that can temporarily detach individuals from their reality. It highlights the power of literature to transport readers to different realms, serving as a more beneficial and accessible alternative to substance abuse for coping with life's challenges.
In practice
In a book club discussion about the therapeutic effects of reading.
There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.
Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.
My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.
I always set out to tell a good story, to create a character that young people can relate to, place them in a situation that will be interesting, intriguing, eventually suspenseful. But what I find is that after I do that, then there are themes that emerge, which teachers can then use to provoke discussion and debate.
You have to teach now - tell a kid how to box out, tell him how to pass, teach him footwork. Players don't understand that anymore.
An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.
When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.
I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.
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