Quotes About Reading

I always advise students who like to read that they should read everything form license plates on cars to signs on the highway, fiction, nonfiction, newspapers, magazines—I mean everything. You never know what you might learn or when and where you can use the information.

However, with the advent of the printing press, more people could read the Bible for themselves and a more sophisticated understanding grew in the public while religious control waned, especially in highly developed nations. Today, the favored control mechanism is through the lending of money.

The book you don't read cant help.

The book you don't read won't help.

To solve any problem, here are three questions to ask yourself First, what could I do Second, what could I read And third, who could I ask

You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.

A nation that does not read much does not know much. And a nation that does not know much is more likely to make poor choices in the home, the marketplace, the jury box, and the voting booth. And those decisions ultimately affect the entire nation...the literate and illiterate.

The more you read, the better you get, the more better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.

The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.

What happened to the classics?" you may ask. "Don't you believe in reading great literature to children?" Nothing happened to the classics-but something happened to children: their imaginations went to sleep in front of the television set twenty-five years ago. Reading a classic to a child whose imagination is in a state of retarded development will not foster a love of literature in that child.

Vocabulary and coherent sentences can't be downloaded onto paper unless they've first been uploaded to the head—by reading.

When someone becomes a teacher, she's like the matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof. All year long she's trying to entice students to go out on dates with authors—that is, to pick up this book or that book and spend twenty minutes with the author, someone they've never met. The better she knows her students and authors or books, the more successful will be the "matchmaking." But the teacher (or librarian) who doesn't read much will fail for sure.

Allow children to choose the books they wish to read to themselves, even if they don't meet your high standards.

The more you read, the better you get at it; the better you get at it, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it. And the more you read, the more you know; and the more you know, the smarter you grow.

The last thing you want first-graders thinking is that what they're reading in first grade is as good as books are going to get!

In a similar experiment involving reading to fetuses during the two and a half months before birth, DeCasper found the child's heartbeat increased with a new story and decreased with a familiar one.

Background knowledge is one reason children who read the most bring the largest amount of information to the learning table and thus understand more of what the teacher or the textbook is teaching. Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying.

Follow the suggestion of Dr. Caroline Bauer and post a reminder sign by your door: "Don't Forget Your Flood Book." Analogous to emergency rations in case of natural disasters, "flood" books should be taken along in the car or even stored like spares in the trunk. A few chapters from these books can be squeezed into traffic jams on the way to the beach or long waits at the doctor's office.

The more you read, the better you get at it; the better you get at it, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.

Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking." (Jincy Willett)

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you.

Nada era verdaderamente insoportable si se tenía algo que leer.

It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.

Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.