Can’t sit still, can’t sit in silence. Don’t know how to read because we also have convinced them that it’s a meaningless activity, and they only want to be productive citizens. So even the patience to read a beautiful sentence — they don’t know how to love a beautiful sentence because they can’t check a box.
…Imagine sitting down with a book. You’re wanting to read, and the whole time you’re like “what’s the point, what’s the point, what’s the point, what’s the use?”
…In [Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451], one of the characters says, ‘We stopped reading books a long time before we started burning them.’… Totalitarian regimes can control you more easily if you don’t read.
…So we uplift freedom and yet the whole time we don’t realize how enslaved we are because we’re not readers, we’re not critical thinkers, we’re not imaginative thinkers anymore.