What is worse than having no sight is being able to see but having no vision.
Helen KellerRead
In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Literature provides an escape and connection that transcends real-world limitations.
In this quote, Helen Keller expresses how literature creates a personal utopia where she feels included and understood. It serves as a refuge from societal barriers, allowing her to engage with her 'book-friends' without the constraints and discomforts that typically accompany human interaction, highlighting the profound impact of literature on human connection and understanding.
Themes
LiteratureFriendshipConnectionDiscourseEscape
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can inspire students at a book club discussion about the power of literature.
More from Helen Keller
All quotes βWhat could be worse than being born without sight? Being born with sight and no vision.
Helen KellerRead
Knowledge is power." Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge - broad, deep knowledge - is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man's progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.
Helen KellerRead
Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.
Helen KellerRead
Our beloved ones have not 'gone to a far country.' It is only the veil of sense that separates them from us, and even that veil grows thin when our thoughts reach out to them.
Helen KellerRead
It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.
Helen KellerRead
Similar quotes
After I had my son I looked everywhere for a book that might serve as some kind of mirror. I bought so many silly books. Now I see what the problem was: I wanted a book about time-about mortality. I can't think of a writer who is at once so experimentally daring and so rigorously uncompromising as Sarah Manguso. Ongoingness is an incredibly elegant, wise book, and I loved it.
Miranda JulyRead
I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
Louis AragonRead
All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Amy LowellRead
There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.
Chinua AchebeRead
If a writer knows what he or she is doing, I'll go along for the ride. If he or she doesn't... well, I'm in my fifties now, and there are a lot of books out there. I don't have time to waste with the poorly written ones.
Stephen KingRead
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
Italo CalvinoRead