A Castle of Words

What ever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we've built, and keep adding new wings to all the time.

Northrup Frye

In order to foster an awareness of the patterns shared even by widely different works of literature, we need to provide children with diverse experiences of literature--with the simple and the complex, the old and the new, the foreign and the domestic, the tragic and the funny, even the good and the bad as we define them for ourselves.

Quote

Nurture your sense of what's possible. We cannot create what we cannot imagine.

Lucille Clifton

Stages of an Avid Reader

Carlson (1974)

A Metaphor

"Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his best knuckleball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down -- not even the pitcher, much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing."

from Chapter 27, Maniac Magee

Quotes

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Sir Isaac Newton