"When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared"
About this Quote
Reading gets sold as a cozy solo activity, but Mahy quietly flips the camera around: every page is crowded with invisible labor. The line is built on a plainspoken reveal - "someone has done a lot of work on your behalf" - that reframes the reader not as a lone genius decoding meaning, but as the beneficiary of a long chain of care. Mahy’s diction is deliberately domestic: "done... on your behalf" sounds like a favor, even a kindness. It’s a moral nudge without the scolding. Gratitude becomes part of literacy.
The intent isn’t to guilt-trip readers into reverence; it’s to puncture the myth that words arrive magically, fully formed. The subtext is craft-as-ethic. "Had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them" names revision as the real engine of communication. Mahy smuggles in an argument about humility: if the text you’re holding is the product of repeated correction, then your own thinking can be corrected too. That’s a subtle defense of editing, of teaching, of institutions that help ideas survive contact with other minds.
Context matters: Mahy wrote for children and young readers, an audience often told that reading is self-improvement or obedience. She offers a better story - reading as relationship. Not with a vague "authorial voice", but with a real person who sweated the sentences into shareability. In an era of frictionless content and algorithmic prose, her reminder lands sharper: good writing is not merely expression; it is consideration made legible.
The intent isn’t to guilt-trip readers into reverence; it’s to puncture the myth that words arrive magically, fully formed. The subtext is craft-as-ethic. "Had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them" names revision as the real engine of communication. Mahy smuggles in an argument about humility: if the text you’re holding is the product of repeated correction, then your own thinking can be corrected too. That’s a subtle defense of editing, of teaching, of institutions that help ideas survive contact with other minds.
Context matters: Mahy wrote for children and young readers, an audience often told that reading is self-improvement or obedience. She offers a better story - reading as relationship. Not with a vague "authorial voice", but with a real person who sweated the sentences into shareability. In an era of frictionless content and algorithmic prose, her reminder lands sharper: good writing is not merely expression; it is consideration made legible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Margaret
Add to List
