Try not to become disappointed if someone doesn't like a story you've written. Stick up for your ideas, but listen to what other people say, too. They might have good advice.
Margaret MahyRead
When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading is a collaborative act where the writer's efforts benefit the reader.
This quote emphasizes the importance of the work that authors and thinkers put into their writings, highlighting that reading is not just a solitary activity but a privilege that comes from the efforts of others. The reader engages with the ideas and corrections made by writers, gaining insights and knowledge that would be unattainable without their hard work.
Themes
ReadingWritingEducationKnowledgeIdeas
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of literacy.
More from Margaret Mahy
All quotes →Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.
Margaret MahyRead
By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.
Margaret MahyRead
Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.
Margaret MahyRead
Perhaps every time anyone is praised it means that someone else somewhere is going to be ignored
Margaret MahyRead
It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.
Margaret MahyRead
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They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.
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