What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of “system” or “conversation” we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.

Tim Parks
About This Quote

This is probably one of the most beautiful quotes I have ever read. As a child, we are told that reading is not important, it is just a waste of time. As we grow older, we ask ourselves if it is really necessary to read books right? How many times has someone told you its not important to read? This quote reminds us that books can be one of the best things in life. Books teach us about the world, about different cultures and different ways of thinking and living and they teach us about who we are and how we should be.

The way people grow up in this world, in most places of the world, is very different from each other. Let us never forget that we must be open to learning and if we continue to let others tell us what to do and what to think, we will not know what is right for us.

Source: Where Im Reading From: The Changing World Of Books

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More Quotes By Tim Parks
  1. What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of “system” or “conversation” we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.
  2. In any power game, it seems, the dominant party is the least likely to be aware of what is going on.
  3. In general, when a novel manipulates its material to conform to the pieties of the day, or alternatively to attack those pieties for no other reason than the visibility such an attack will generate, when its literary tropes are all too familiar, its clever prose...
  4. But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a certain desperation may be seen more complacently as the writer...
  5. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.
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