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.

The saying contrasts two kinds of formation. Parents teach foundational human capacities—affection, joy, and the basic skills needed to navigate life (“how to put one foot before the other”). Books, however, provide imaginative and intellectual liberation: opening them reveals “wings,” a metaphor for independence, aspiration, and the ability to travel beyond one’s immediate circumstances. Hayes frames reading not as a replacement for family but as an enlargement of the self, suggesting that literature grants access to other lives, ideas, and possibilities. The line also implies that education is a kind of second birth: where upbringing grounds you, reading enables flight.