“What is it exactly that you do with a book?” “You read it.” “Oh,” she said. And then, “What does read mean?”… — Walter Tevis
“What is it exactly that you do with a book?”
“You read it.”
“Oh,” she said. And then, “What does read mean?”
I nodded. Then I began turning the pages of the book I was holding and said, “Some of these markings here represent sounds. And the sounds make words. You look at the marks and sounds come into your mind and, after you practice long enough, they begin to sound like hearing a person talking. Talking—but silently.”
p. 56Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: “When in doubt, forget it.”
p. 22
I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.
p. 248
When literacy died, so had history.
p. 161
