What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
Interpretation
A great book immerses you in diverse experiences, leaving you feeling fulfilled yet tired from the journey.
William Styron suggests that reading a great book allows readers to immerse themselves in various experiences and perspectives, making them feel as if they have lived multiple lives. This engagement can be emotionally and mentally exhausting, indicating the depth and richness of the literature that transports readers beyond their own reality.
In practice
Using this quote during a book club meeting to discuss the emotional impact of reading.
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.
If you can remember all the accessories that go with your best outfit, the contents of your purse, the starting lineup of the New York Yankees or the Houston Oilers, or what label "Hang On Sloopy" by The McCoys was on, you are capable of remembering the differences between a gerund (verb form used as a noun) and a participle (verb form used as an adjective).
Educating the world's poorest girls can only be done with the firm commitment of many stakeholders - both domestic and international - to plan, fund, and build strong, sustainable, and equitable education systems.
I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.
If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.
Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.
African American children are significantly more likely to be obese than are white children. Nearly half of African American children will develop diabetes at some point in their lives. People, that's half of our children. ...We can build our kids the best schools on earth, but if they don't have the basic nutrition they need to concentrate, they're still going to have a challenge learning.
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