Rachel

“Don't give in to your fears. If you do, you won't be able to talk to your heart.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Writers reduce what they write, and readers reduce what they read. The brain itself is made to reduce, replace, emblemize... Verisimilitude is not only a false idol, but also an unattainable goal. So we reduce. And it is not without reverence that we reduce. This is how we apprehend our world. This is what humans do.

Picturing stories is making reductions. Through reduction, we create meaning.

These reductions are the world as we see it - they are what we see when we read, and they are what we see when we read the world.

They are what reading looks like (if it looks like anything at all).”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“River, the word, contains within it all rivers, which flow like tributaries into it. And this word contains not only all rivers, but more important all my rivers: every accesible experience of every river I've seen, swum in, fished, heard about, felt directly or been affected by in any other manner oblique, secondhand or otherwise. These "rivers" are infinitely tessellating rills and affluents that feed fiction's ability to spur the imagination. I read the word river and, with or without context, I'll dip beneath its surface. (I'm a child wading in the moil and suck, my feet cut on a river's rock-bottom; or the gray river just out the window, now, just to my right, over the trees of the park-spackled with ice. Or-the almost seismic eroticism of a memory from my teens-of the shift of a skirt on a girl in spring, on a quai by an arabesque of a river, in a foreign city...)

This is a word's dormant power, brimming with pertinence. So little is needed from the author, when you think of it.

(We are already flooded by river water, and only need the author to tap this reservoir.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words "contain" meanings, but, more important, words potentiate meaning...”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read