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.
The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.
You are at some point exposed to a wonderful story, and you really want to know what happens next, so you learn to read in order to find out.
The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can't do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That's how you make it all of one piece.
To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.
I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.
I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.
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