Education Quote by R. A. Salvatore

A love story with a quiet betrayal baked in: the speaker starts as a kid who’s already converted to language, then gets slowly disinvited by an institution that treats reading as compliance. Salvatore’s pivot on “but then something happened” is doing heavy work. It’s not that he stopped loving books; it’s that school managed to make books feel like someone else’s property, someone else’s life, someone else’s definition of “good.”

The sharpest line is “handed books.” Passive voice, literal and emotional. Reading becomes an assignment passed down a chain of authority, not a choice or a hunt. That’s the subtext: curricula often confuse cultural inheritance with cultural relevance, mistaking gatekeeping for rigor. When he says the books didn’t “remotely connect to the realities of my life,” he’s not just arguing for relatability; he’s describing alienation as pedagogy. You can practically hear a student learning the wrong lesson: literature is what happens in distant rooms to people who don’t look or sound like you, and your job is to nod along for a grade.

Context matters here because Salvatore is a fantasy writer whose career is built on making “unreal” worlds feel intensely lived-in. The irony is pointed: the canon wasn’t failing because it lacked dragons; it was failing because it lacked invitation. His intent reads like a critique of how schools can turn readers into skeptics, and how many lifelong readers are minted not by “important books,” but by the first story that actually recognizes them.