43 Quotes on the Importance of Reading

1. A book is a gift you can open again and again. —Garrison Keillor

2. Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. —Kofi Annan

3. Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. —Frederick Douglass

4. Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his needs, is good for him. —Maya Angelou

5. There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book. —Frank Serafini

6. Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. —Emilie Buchwald

7. One of the greatest gifts adults can give—to their offspring and to their society—is to read to children. —Carl Sagan

8. You may have tangible wealth untold; caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I, you can never be. I had a mother who read to me. —Strickland Gillian

9. Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty.  It should be offered to them as a precious gift. —Kate DiCamillo

10. Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light. —Vera Nazarian

11. Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. —Groucho Marx

12. There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. —May Ellen Chase

13. To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark. —Victor Hugo

14. It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations—something that will help them to make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own. —Katherine Patterson

15. When you learn to read you will be born again…and you will never be quite so alone again. —Rumer Godden

16. We read to know we are not alone. —C.S. Lewis

17. So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky. —William James

18. There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all. —Jacqueline Kennedy

19. The greatest gift is a passion for reading. —Elizabeth Hardwick

20. There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book. —Marcel Proust

21. Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality. —L.R. Knost

22. Read, read, read. —William Faulkner

23. Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Then when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them. And you can select whichever you like, just like a captain choosing a stickball team. —Karen Witemeyer

24. Books are a uniquely portable magic. —Stephen King

25. Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time. —E.P. Whipple

26. A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say, “How to Build a Boat.” —Stephen Wright

27. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. —Richard Steele

28. There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back. —Jim Fiebig

29. A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time—proof that humans can work magic. —Carl Sagan

30. A house without books is like a room without windows. —Heinrich Mann

31. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever. —Louis L’Amour

32. Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything. —Tomie dePaola

33. It is books that are the key to the wide world; if you can’t do anything else, read all that you can. —Jane Hamilton

34. I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. —Anna Quindlen

35. A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read. —Mark Twain

36. Comics are a gateway drug to literacy. —Art Spiegelman

37. He that loves reading has everything within his reach. —William Godwin

38. Let us read and let us dance—two amusements that will never do any harm to the world. —Voltaire

39. Wear the old coat and buy the new book. —Austin Phelps

40. I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp. —JK Rowling

41. Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. —Kathleen Norris

42. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. —S.I. Hayakawa

43. I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. —Jorge Luis Borges