Daniel Pennac Quotes

#1. We see that that ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were so little
set time, set gestures
was like a prayer.

Daniel Pennac

#2. Again, again ... " really means "We must love each other, you and I, if this one story, told and retold, is all we need." Reading again isn't about repeating yourself; it's about offering fresh proof of a love that never tires.

Daniel Pennac

#3. Time spent reading, like time spent loving, increases our lifetime.

Daniel Pennac

#4. A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself.

Daniel Pennac

#5. The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it.

Daniel Pennac

#6. Each country thinks its school is in a specific crisis, without ever linking the school's crisis to that of the society around it.

Daniel Pennac

#7. You can't make someone read. Just like you can't make them fall in love, or dream ...

Daniel Pennac

#8. By making time to read, like making time to love, we expand our time for living.

Daniel Pennac

#9. When you buy a jacket, it's important the pockets are big enough for a paperback!

Daniel Pennac

#10. I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.

Daniel Pennac

#11. I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.

Daniel Pennac

#12. The question isn't whether I have time to read or not (time that nobody will ever give me, by the way), but whether I'll allow myself the pleasure of being a reader.

Daniel Pennac

#13. He was an echo chamber for all books, the physical incarnation of words, the book made human.

Daniel Pennac

#14. A child has no great wish to perfect himself in the use of an instrument of torture, but make it a means to his pleasure, and soon you will not be able to keep him from it.

Daniel Pennac

#15. All it takes is one teacher - just one - to save us from ourselves and make us forget all the others.

Daniel Pennac

#16. The teacher is commodified, the school is a shop, the subjects are consumer goods. To read, to think, to reflect, isn't a question of want, it's a question of need.

Daniel Pennac

#17. The children became their reciprocal angels: readers.

Daniel Pennac

#18. I master my doubts now. I have fun with them, they're my travelling companions.

Daniel Pennac

#19. Reassured, we left their bedroom without understanding
or wanting to admit
that what a child learns first isn't the act but the gestures that accompany the act. And although it may also help them learn, this ostentatious show of reading is primarily intended to reassure them and please us.

Daniel Pennac

#20. If reading isn't about communication, it is, in the end, about sharing. But a deferred and fiercely selective kind of sharing.

Daniel Pennac

#21. Time to read is always time stolen. (Like time to write, for that matter, or time to love).
Stolen from what?
From the tyranny of living.

Daniel Pennac

#22. Forced to think you end up coming to a conclusion.Forced to come to a conclusion you make a decision.And once you made the decision you really acts.

Daniel Pennac

#23. Reading is an act of resistance. Against what? Against all constraints.

Daniel Pennac