by Anne White
One of those much-shared literary quotations came across my social media feed today, and I liked it enough to look it up on QuoteInvestigator.com. It turns out that, yes, it did come from the American writer James Baldwin, (as you can read there). Here is a pretty well documented version of it:
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
In an earlier printing of the quote, Baldwin specifically mentions Dickens and Dostoevsky, which brings to mind a certain quote from Roald Dahl's Matilda:
All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen. If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television.
Charlotte Mason might say "Scott and Shakespeare," or "Tanglewood Tales and Plutarch." In various chapters of her volumes, she uses illustrations from novels by Thackeray and Eliot, poems by Milton and Wordsworth, and cartoons from Punch. If you don't particularly like Kipling, or can't handle long Russian novels, that's okay; the point is that, somewhere on the shelf of the very best books, you will find your people.
“We read to know that we are not alone.” (William Nicholson, screenwriter, in the 1993 film Shadowlands)
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