Manuel Puig Quotes

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

I grew up in a rural area. Books are what helped me transcend my circumstances.

The beauty of reading is that it lets you travel in a way you could never know.

You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free.

We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls.

Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. . . . Imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking the long road home. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.

to know how to read is to light a lamp in the mind, to release the soul from prison, to open a gate to the universe." from Pavilion of Women page 292

I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.

When books are opened, we discover that we have wings

I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There’s a whole new world in books. If you can’t afford to travel, you travel mentally through reading. You can see anything and go any place you want to in reading.

Books were my pass to personal freedom.

I can't imagine I could have become the person I am now without books. Books became synonymous with freedom. They showed that you could open doors and walk through.

The only way to be totally free is through education.

I breathed the air of deliverance through books, and through books I leapt over the walls of confinement.

The man that I named the Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing. It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere. It gives him choices. It gives him freedom. Those are magnificent, wonderfully unsafe things. [from her Newberry Award acceptance speech]

Your curse is that you have chosen a form that requires endless study .... It means you have to read, you have to observe, you have to think, so that when you turn your imagination on, it has the fuel to do its job.

Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.

You're innocent when you dream.

Light and liberty go together.

I think of reading as like a medicine cabinet.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.

The road to freedom, here and everywhere, begins in the classroom.

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.