“I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible.”
Apocalypse Descending (2002)
Context: I was about ten when I first read 1984 and Lord of the Flies, both of which absolutely terrified me — especially 1984, because I figured out that Julia, Winston Smith's lover, would have been born the same year I was. I knew these books were fiction, but I was far too young to have a grasp on the political or cultural realities behind them — I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible.
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Elizabeth Hand 33
American writer 1957Related quotes
“Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?”
From the fourth book, "The Book of Impotence"
The Pillow Book
Kathleen Norris, on the publication of her seventy-eighth book, as cited in: James Charlton. The Writer's quotation book. 1985. p. 34
Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), " Theology amidst the stones and dust http://girardianlectionary.net/res/alison_elijah.htm", p. 38.
“It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read.”
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), A Cold Day
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
“I can read in red.
I can read in blue.
I can read in pickle color too.”
Source: I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
Variant: There are too many books I haven't read, too many places I haven't seen, too many memories I haven't kept long enough
The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: Our education system has gone to hell. It’s my idea from now on to stop spending money educating children who are sixteen years old. We should put all that money down into kindergarten. Young children have to be taught how to read and write. If children went into the first grade knowing how to read and write, we’d be set for the future, wouldn’t we? We must not let them go into the fourth and fifth grades not knowing how to read. So we must put out books with educational pictures, or use comics to teach children how to read. When I was five years old, my aunt gave me a copy of a book of wonderful fairy tales called Once Upon a Time, and the first fairy tale in the book is “Beauty and the Beast.” That one story taught me how to read and write because I looked at the picture of that beautiful beast, but I so desperately wanted to read about him too.