Art & Creativity Quote by Margaret Walker

Childhood is where allegiances get made, and Walker’s line reads like an oath. “When I was about eight” is doing more than setting a scene; it’s staking out origin-story territory, the moment a sensibility hardens into a lifelong practice. The sentence isn’t dreamy nostalgia. It’s a declaration of priority: books come second only to people, not above them, not as an escape hatch from them. That ranking matters because it frames reading as a moral and social act, not a solitary hobby.

The phrasing “most wonderful thing” carries a kid’s absolute conviction, but the clause “next to a human being” is the adult poet’s correction. Walker is careful not to romanticize the page as superior to life; she places it adjacent to human presence, implying that books are valuable precisely because they expand what a person can hold: memory, empathy, history, language. Subtext: a book is a portable community, a way to meet minds you’d never be allowed to meet otherwise.

Context sharpens the intent. Walker, a Black woman born in 1915 in the Jim Crow South, grew up in a country that systematically restricted Black mobility, schooling, and safety. In that world, books weren’t neutral objects; they were access, contraband, proof of interior freedom. The quote works because it compresses that stakes-heavy reality into a child’s discovery: literacy as wonder, wonder as survival, survival as art.