Quotes on Reading and Literacy

“I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.”

Charles De Secondat (1689-1755)

“The poor and the affluent are not communicating because they do not have the same words. When we talk of the millions who are culturally deprived, we refer not to those who do not have access to good libraries and bookstores, or to museums and centers for the performing arts, but those deprived of the words with which everything else is built, the words that open doors. Children without words are licked before they start. The legion of the young wordless in urban and rural slums, eight to ten years old, do not know the meaning of hundreds of words which most middle-class people assume to be familiar to much younger children. Most of them have never seen their parents read a book or a magazine, or heard words used in other than rudimentary ways related to physical needs and functions. Thus is cultural fallout caused, the vicious circle of ignorance and poverty reinforced and perpetuated. Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.”  Peter S. Jennison

“A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.”  Erica Jong, O Magazine, 2003

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.”  Sir Richard Steele

“Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.”  Christopher Morley (1890 - 1957)

“I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage.”  Charles De Secondat (1689 - 1755)

“Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”  Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972)

“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”  Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Walden

“Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or endeavoring something for the public good.”  Thomas a Kempis (1380 - 1471)

“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”  Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)

“Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.”  Horace Mann (1796 - 1859)

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.”  Harold Bloom (1930 -  ), O Magazine, April 2003

“The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”  Theodore Parker (1810 - 1860)

“The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.”  Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)

“I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.”  Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - ), Address to US Congress, 1975

“If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth the writing.”  Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”  John Locke (1632 - 1704)

“Where do I find the time for not reading so many books?”  Karl Kraus (1874 - 1936)

“Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have while trying to write one.”  Robert Byrne

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”  Logan Pearsall Smith (1865 - 1946)

“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.”  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 - 1762)

“If the riches of the Indies, or the crowns of all the kingdom of Europe, were laid at my feet in exchange for my love of reading, I would spurn them all.”  Francois Fenelon

“Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading.”  Rufus Choate

“The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.”  Katherine Mansfield (1888 - 1923)

I cannot live without books.         Thomas Jefferson

Books are Y2K compliant.           Unknown 

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think.    James McCosh

Outside of a dog a book is man's best.  Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.   Groucho Marx 

I must say that I find television very educational.  The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.    Groucho Marx 

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.     Chinese Proverb

Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing.   Cicero

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.              Mortimer J. Adler

He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.             John Milton

Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.

 Paxton Hood

Don't join the book burners... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book.      Dwight D. Eisenhower

Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book.     Charles Kingsley

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life.   W. Somerset Maugham

Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.    John Witherspoon

A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever.      Martin Tupper

What's a book?  Everything or nothing.  The eye that sees it all.     Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.     Heinrich Heine 

A good word is like a good tree whose root is firmly fixed and whose top is in the sky.     The Koran

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends: they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.

Charles W. Eliot

A library is a hospital for the mind.     Anonymous

I had just taken to reading.  I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes...  My world began to expand very rapidly,... the reading habit had got me securely.

H. G. Wells

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.      Henry Ward Beecher

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

Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.     Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

I divide all readers into two classes: Those who read to remember and those who read to forget.     William Phelps

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me.  I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.  As I see it today, the ability to read awoke in me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.     Malcolm X

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.     Ralph Waldo Emerson

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read.     S. I. Hayakawa

It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise.  Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind.     Sydney Smith

Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point.  The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.      Edward Gibbon

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.     Walt Disney

The more that you read, the more things you will know.  The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.     Dr. Seuss

Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence.  If you gain fifteen minutes a day,  it will make itself felt at the end of the year.

     Horace Mann

The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.     Thomas Carlyle

When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.     Marie de Sevigne

The way a book is read-which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book-can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

      Norman Cousins

My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia.  When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free.

     Kirk Douglas

T'is the good reader that makes the good book.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.     Erasmus

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.     W. Somerset Maugham

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.     Edmund Burke

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.     B. F. Skinner

The end of reading is not more books but more life.     Holbrook Jackson

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.     Virginia Woolf

Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual.     Socrates

Literature is my Utopia.     Helen Keller

Reading maketh a full man.     Francis Bacon

My library was dukedom large enough.     William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.     Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.     Jean Fritz

When I got [my] library card, that was when my life began.     Rita Mae Brown

The library, I believe, is the last of our public institutions to which you can go without credentials.  You don't even need the sticker on your windshield that you need to get into the public beach.  All you need is the willingness to read.     Harry Golden

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested.     Francis Bacon

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.     Jorge Luis Borges

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.     John Naisbitt

A library should be like a pair of open arms.     Roger Rosenblatt

[The library] is like a place of sacredness. If we were fools at onetime, perhaps we will not be fools tomorrow, if we study.     Chief Tom Porter

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.     Marston Bates

T'is true: there's magic in the web of it...     William Shakespeare, Othello Act 3, Scene 4

More people should use their library.     Regis Philbin

What can I say? Librarians rule.     Regis Philbin

What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.     Stephen Jay Gould

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.     Roger Ebert

Words are the voice of the heart.     Confucius

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

Books had instant replay long before televised sports.     Bern Williams

The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.     Theodore Parker

The libraries have become my candy store.     Juliana Kimball

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.     Daniel J. Boorstein

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.     Longfellow

     Unknown

Knowledge is knowing... or knowing where to find out.     Alvin Toffler

None is poor save him that lacks knowledge.     The Talmud

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.     Benjamin Franklin

Learning is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily.     Chinese Proverb

"Librarians are not just good at internet searching because we understand how to play word games.  We're good because we know where we need to go and the quickest routes for getting there; we are equipped not just with compasses but with mental maps of the information landscape.     Marylaine Block

"I may not be an explorer, or an adventurer, or a treasure-seeker, or a gunfighter, Mr. O'Connell, but I am proud of what I am...I, am a librarian!"

     From the movie, The Mummy

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.     Abraham Lincoln

What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it thinks about education.     Harold Howe, former U.S. Commissioner of Education

Students who score higher on "tests tend to come from schools which have more library resource staff and more books, periodicals and videos, and where the instructional role of the teacher-librarian and involvement in cooperative program planning and teaching is more prominent."

     Keith Curry Lance, et. al. The Impact of School Library Media Centers on Academic Achievement.

If you want to work on the core problem, it's early school literacy.     James Barksdale, Former CEO of Netscape

Literacy is not a luxury, it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century we must harness the energy and creativity of all our citizens.

     President Clinton

Literacy arouses hopes, not only in society as a whole but also in the individual who is striving for fulfillment, happiness and personal benefit by learning how to read and write. Literacy... means far more than learning how to read and write... The aim is to transmit... knowledge and promote social participation.          UNESCO Institute for Education, Hamburg, Germany

You're the same today as you'll be in five years except for the people you meet and the books you read.     Charlie "Tremendous" Jones

No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.     Confucious

The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.     Dr. Seuss

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

The nonreading children are the greatest problem in American education.     Glenn Doman "How to Teach Your Baby to Read"

Some people will lie, cheat, steal and back-stab to get ahead... and to think, all they have to do is READ.     Fortune

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.     Margaret Fuller

A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance.     Lyndon Baines Johnson

Through literacy you can begin to see the universe.  Through music you can reach anybody.  Between the two there is you, unstoppable.     Grace Slick

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.     Joseph

When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.     Christopher Morley

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.     Groucho Marx

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.     Abraham Lincoln

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

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

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

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.     Maya Angelou

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.     Walt Disney

Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.     Hazel Rochman

I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.     Montesquieu

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.     Ray Bradbury

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up children without surrounding them with books.... Children learn to read being in the presence of books.     Horace Mann

A library book...is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, is their only capital.     Thomas Jefferson

Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path.     Carl Sagan

Two trucks loaded with a thousand copies of Roget's Thesaurus collided as they left a New York publishing house last week, according to the Associated Press. Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied, appalled, surprised, shocked and rattled.     Alan Schlein

A book is a garden carried in the pocket.     Chinese proverb

No player in the NBA was born wanting to play basketball. The desire to play ball or to read must be planted. The last 25 years of research show that reading aloud to a child is the oldest, cheapest and must successful method of instilling that desire. Shooting baskets with a child creates a basketball player; reading to a child creates a reader.     Jim Trelease

Inspiring Quotations For Teachers and Volunteers

       These quotations, both famous and not-so-famous, can remind us what's really important about our work.  The first set of quotations consists mostly of inspirational thoughts about volunteering.  The second set of quotes can help us to be most effective in the teaching of reading.

 Inspiring Quotations for Volunteers

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.     Margaret Mead

 You cannot help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself.     General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

 "Well see," said Sasha, "it just happened one day and suddenly it felt like 'Yippee, I CAN READ,'" and he threw up his arms and laughed, "and it made me feel different inside my tummy.  I felt kind of powerful."     V. Polakow

 One hundred years from now, It will not matter what kind of car I drove, What kind of house I lived in, Or how much money I had in the bank, But the world may be a better place because I made a difference in a child's life.     Author unknown

 The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.     Mahatma Gandhi

 Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.     Ralph Waldo Emerson

 Education is a vaccine for violence.     Edward James Olmos

 No man is so poor as to have nothing worth giving. Give what you have. To someone it may be better than you dare to think.                                  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

 Everyone can be great because everyone can serve.     Martin Luther King Jr.

Quotations About the Teaching of Reading

 Enthusiasm is contagious; start an epidemic.     Don Ward

Author unknown

 If a seed of lettuce will not grow, we do not blame the lettuce. Instead, the fault lies with us for not having nourished the seed properly.                Buddhist proverb.

 A word of encouragement during a failure is worth more than an hour of praise after success.     Anonymous

  Nobody cares how much you know unless they know how much you care.     Author unknown

 It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.     Albert Einstein

 Reading aloud to children teaches vocabulary in one of the most natural ways possible. Most of the questions come from them rather than the teacher.  Words that are puzzling can be quickly explained in the context of the story.     Frank B. May

Teaching...can be likened to a conversation in which you listen to the speaker carefully before you reply.     Marie Clay

 Choice isn't just about picking a book.  Choice is about allowing reluctant readers to retain ownership of, and to take responsibility for, the processes in which they are engaged and the topics they care about.  Putting choice into their hands allows reluctant readers to feel the power and control over reading that all good readers feel.     Ron Jobe and Mary Dayton-Sakari

When I worked on my game, that's what I thought about.  When it happened, I set another goal, a reasonable, manageable goal that I could realistically achieve if I worked hard enough.  I guess I approached it with the end in mind.  I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and I focused on getting there.

Michael Jordan

 Children should spend less time completing workbooks and skill sheets...there is little evidence that these activities are related to reading achievement.

Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading, Richard C. Anderson, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Judith A. Scott, and Ian A.G. Wilkinson

 Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.     H. H. Williams

 Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.     Mason Cooley

 Kids not only need to read a lot but they need lots of books they can read right at their fingertips. They also need access to books that entice them, attract them to reading.  Schools...can make it easy and unrisky for children to take books home for the evening or weekend by worrying less about losing books to children and more about losing children to illiteracy.     Richard L. Allington

What Really Matters for Struggling Readers:  Designing Research-Based Programs

I have one rule--attention. They give me theirs and I give them mine.     Sister Evangelist RSM

 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 make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.

Katherine Patterson

 The secret of education is respecting the pupil.     Ralph Waldo Emerson

 As the child approaches a new text he is entitled to an introduction so that when he reads, the gist of the... story can provide some guide for a fluent reading.     Marie Clay

Encouragement is oxygen to the soul.     George M. Adams

Children should spend more time writing.  As well as being valuable in its own right, writing promotes ability in reading.

Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading, Richard C. Anderson, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Judith A. Scott, and Ian A.G. Wilkinson

 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

 Almost anything can become a learning experience if there is enough caring involved.     Mary MacCracken

Definitions of literacy

"Learning to read after so long is like walking into light from darkness." - A young woman attending a children's school in Jahan Shah, Afghanistan, where the overwhelming desire of illiterate young women to learn means that exceptions are made to the rule against allowing mothers to attend their children's lessons.

"Literacy can be defined on a number of levels. It is obviously concerned with the ability to read and write but a fuller definition might be the capacity to recognise, reproduce and manipulate the conventions of text shared by a given community." - John Hertrich in the HMI Secondary Literacy Survey

"Literacy is not something separate from English. It is a vital subset of English and it is also an aspect of our communicative abilities. It cannot be separated entirely from oracy, on which it builds, and it is an essential part of the learning process. Literacy is, or ought to be, a shared responsibility - it is too important to leave to English teachers...There are new forms of literacy (on-screen literacy and moving image  media) to consider alongside the more traditional print literacy. Literacy is important because it enables pupils to gain access to the subjects studied in school, to read for information and pleasure, and to communicate effectively. Poor levels of literacy impact negatively on what pupils can do and how they see themselves." - John Hertrich in the HMI Secondary Literacy Survey

"Reading literacy is defined in PISA as the ability to understand, use and reflect on written texts in order to achieve one's goals, to develop one's knowledge and potential, and to participate effectively in society." - Literacy Skills for the World of Tomorrow: further results from PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] 2000, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development/Unesco Institute for Statistics, 2003

"A literate person has the ability to process information critically through interaction of their knowledge of the world and the information that is presented in writing and other media." - South Camden Community School

Functional literacy

Reports about levels of literacy often refer to functional literacy as the borderline separating the literate from the illiterate. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development defines functional literacy not as the ability to read and write but as "whether a person is able to understand and employ printed information in daily life, at home, at work and in the community".

 General quotations about literacy and learning

President Clinton on International Literacy Day, September 8th 1994: "Literacy is not a luxury, it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century we must harness the energy and creativity of all our citizens." 

Michael Fullan, expert on educational change at Toronto University: "The kind of teacher who is afraid that they are going to be replaced by a computer should be."

Jacqueline Wilson: "I have this belief that children become readers before they can read. They become hooked on books because they were read aloud to as a child."

Paulo Freire, 'Education:The Practice of Freedom' (1973) "To acquire literacy is more than to psychologically and mechanically dominate reading and writing techniques. It is to dominate those techniques in terms of consciousness; to understand what one reads and to write what one understands: it is to communicate graphically. Acquiring literacy does not involve memorising sentences, words or syllables - lifeless objects unconnected to an existential universe - but rather an attitude of creation and re-creation, a self-transformation producing a stance of intervention in one's context." 

A C Grayling, Financial Times (in a review of A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel, HarperCollins 1996): "To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries." 

From evidence submitted to The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future - 1999: "I was supposed to be a welfare statistic... It was because of a teacher that I sit at this table. I remember her telling us one cold, miserable day that she could not make our clothing better; she could not provide us with food; she could not change the terrible segregated conditions under which we lived. She could introduce us to the world of reading, the world of books and that is what she did.

"What a world! I visited Asia and Africa. I saw magnificant sunsets; I tasted exotic foods; I fell in love and danced in wonderful halls. I ran away with escaped slaves and stood beside a teenage martyr. I visited lakes and streams and composed lines of verse. I knew then that I wanted to help children do the same things; I wanted to weave magic."

Learning To Succeed (1993) "All children must achieve a good grasp of literacy and basic skills early on as the foundation for learning throughout life." 

Margaret Meek, Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education (in conversation 1996): 'If there is a full rich literacy for everyone, we can discover what literacy is good for. It's what people do with their reading and writing that is important. Language makes so many things possible.' 

Margaret Meek, Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, 'On Being Literate': "There are different versions of literacy, some much fuller than others, some much more powerful than others. Where they go to school seems to lead some children to positions of power in adult life even more directly than how they prove their competencies in examinations that are open to all. Literacy is part of our class system..... 

"The great divide in literacy is not between those who can read and write and those who have not yet learned how to. It is between those who have discovered what kinds of literacy society values and how to demonstrate their competencies in ways that earn recognition." 

Neil McClelland, Director, National Literacy Trust: "We want to help create a society in which every member has the appropriate literacy skills to realise their full potential." 

UNESCO Institute for Education, Hamburg: "Literacy arouses hopes, not only in society as a whole but also in the individual who is striving for fulfilment, happiness and personal benefit by learning how to read and write. Literacy...means far more than learning how to read and write...The aim is to transmit ...knowledge and promote social participation." 

David Barton: "Literacy is part of everyday social practice - it mediates all aspects of everyday life. Literacy is always part of something else - we are always doing something with it. Its what we choose to do with it that is important. There are a range of contemporary literacies available to us - while print literacy was the first mass media, it is now one of the mass media."

Peter Schrag, American educationist: "The longest distance in the world is between an official ..... curriculum policy and what goes on in the mind of a child."

PJ O'Rourke, American writer:  "Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it." 

Professor David Crystal: "Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar."

Thomas Carlyle: "All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is all lying in magic preservation in the pages of books."

Mark Twain: "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

Groucho Marx: "Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." 

Abraham Lincoln: "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read." 

Dolly Parton, speaking about the Dollywood Foundation in the Radio Time, 22 December 2001: "We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life."

Angela Carter: Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."

Maya Angelou: "Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."

Emilie Buchwald: "Children are made readers on the laps of their parents."

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

Coolio: "I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book."

Groucho Marx: "When I picked up your book I was so convulsed with laughter that I had to set it down, but one day I intend to read it"

Dorothy Parker: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

The power of reading

Joe Simpson - The Beckoning Silence: "It occurred to me that the only reason I was here was because of reading; it was the reason I began to climb. There is something about reading which takes you beyond the constrictions of space and time, frees you from the limitations of social interaction and allows you to escape. Whoever you encounter within the pages of a book, whatever lives you vicariously live with them can affect you deeply - entertain you briefly, change your view of the world, open your eyes to a wholly different concept of living and the value of life. Books can be the immortality that some seek; thoughts and words left for future generations to hear from beyond the grave and awaken a memory of another's life."

George W Bush: "In this job, there are some simple pleasures that really help you cope. One is books, I mean, books are a great escape. Books are a way to get your mind on something else."

Mohandas Gandhi: "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."

Ezra Pound: "Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. "

 Lyndon Baines Johnson: "A book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance."

Dr. Seuss: "The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go."

Confucius: "No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."

Samuel Johnson "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good."

S.I. Hayakawa "It is not true we have only one life to love, if we can read, we can live as many lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish."

Maya Angelou: "When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young."

Walt Disney: "There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island."

Hazel Rochman: "Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."

ICT related 

Keir Bloomer, President of the Association of Directors in Education, ADE conference, Edinburgh, November 1999: "In an information-rich age, who will ensure that it is not only the rich who have information?"