Quotes About Literacy

Librarians save lives by handing the right book at the right time to a kid in need.

Let all the time you can get be spent in trying to learn to read.

when people don't have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries.

As soon as we associate reading with a test, we've missed the point.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

I bet you a million dollars there are less than five books in this whole house. What kind of life can you have in a house without books?

I cannot overstate the power of libraries in my life.

I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.

I have said it often and I will say it again: I believe you learn to read when you are young, then read to learn for the rest of your life.

You cannot live this life anymore without the ability to read.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

We book people are always preaching about reading aloud to children, but unless you do, you can't realize how it enriches family life.

I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life.

Once I learned to read, I could not imagine my life otherwise.

Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be -- to me in all events -- a terrible thing without books.

The dry knowledge of the three R's is not even now, it can never be, a permanent part of the villagers' life.

In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.

I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our lack of attention to funding and caring for them properly in the United States has a direct bearing on problems of literacy, productivity, and our inability to compete in today's world. Libraries are everyman's free university.

Reading's the means by which the lowest man can lift himself from a state of ignorance.

Taking the alphabet first and learning one letter a year for twenty-six years he will be able to read and write as early in life as he ought to. If we were more careful not to teach our children to read in their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of pernicious literature upon their adolescent morals.

If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of whom was past sixty.

Some lay persons of higher status were also apparently literate, at least in Icelandic, but all writing, whether in the international language of the church or in the vernacular, was the result of the conversion to Christianity, which brought with it the technology of manuscript writing.

True to a unique tradition of Rome, all the nearby walls had been slathered with that unique institution of the Latin race: graffiti. Daubed in paint of every color were slogans such as Death to the aristocrats! and The shade of Tribune Ateius calls out for blood! and May the curse of Ateius fall on Crassus and all his friends! All of this was scrawled wretchedly and spelled worse. Rome has an extremely high rate of literacy, mostly so that the citizens can practice this particular art form.

I remembered how it had been first learning to read, how the squiggles of print finally organized themselves slowly and painfully into words, then pieced together into sentences with meaning. Now, for the first time, the squiggles were releasing actual worlds... All of them surfacing from the page so real that when I finally closed my eyes, I was amazed their lives didn't continue around me. A whole world somehow tucked back into the book, waiting for me to set it free.