Top 100 Children Reading Quotes
#1. It is my desire to break the destructive generational cycle of illiteracy in the home by focusing on the children. Reading to your child has so much value as a parent because it opens the lines of communication.
Victoria Osteen
#2. If the White House could do more to tell parents that getting children reading is their business too, we'd see a big difference. Hollywood and the NBA or NFL could step in, too. In England they have an event called Book Day, where every child receives a pound to use at any bookstore.
James Patterson
#4. We measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic system, to become the principal yardstick for our definition of our children's worth.
Kenneth Keniston
#5. My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I've passed it on to my children.
Corin Tucker
#6. If the parents are too busy to read, it's a safe bet the children will feel the same way. Set aside time for family reading each night. It doesn't matter so much what the kids read, as long as you provide them space for reading and a sense that it is a valuable part of your daily routine.
Rick Riordan
#7. I always feel like my book is a success when I see a child reading it, and they have their pointer finger out, and they kind of keep their place as they look all around the page. I've always been impressed by how children are so observant.
Jan Brett
#8. I graduated from my Master of Fine Arts program for writing for children and young adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Of course, for a master's program, you have to do a ton of reading. I would get up, usually around 5:30, to do my reading; otherwise, I would fall behind.
Lisa Papademetriou
#9. As parents, the most important thing we can do
is read to our children early and often. Reading
is the path to success in school and life. When
children learn to love books, they learn to love
learning.
Laura Bush
#10. I believe we should spend less time worrying about the quantity of books children read and more time introducing them to quality books that will turn them on to the joy of reading and turn them into lifelong readers.
James Patterson
#11. Readers have told me that their children have learned to read after years of struggle after starting to read Garfield's comic strip and many people who have moved to the United States have said that they, too, learned English by reading Garfield.
Jim Davis
#12. My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window.
Gail Caldwell
#13. The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...
Bruno Bettelheim
#14. If you ever meet someone who thinks they are so special, the best thing to do is smile. You don't have to say anything. Be friendly and then go do
your best. That will make you special, too!
Jeff Hutchins
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Through reading the scriptures, we can gain the assurance of the Spirit that that which we read has come of God for the enlightenment, blessing, and joy of his children.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#18. Reading is my passion and my escape since I was 5 years old. Overall, children don't realize the magic that can live inside their own heads. Better even then any movie.
Eckhart Tolle
#19. Everywhere I go, kids walk around not with books under their arms, but with radios up against their heads. Children can't read or write, but they can memorize whole albums.
Jesse Jackson
#20. Reading with my children is incredibly important to me and a wonderful way to spend time together as a family, exploring magical worlds through books and stories.
Frank Lampard
#21. For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um ... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something ... then yeah, they're old enough. LOL
Michelle M. Pillow
#22. I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.
Fanny Howe
#23. Although Lewis Carroll thought of The Hunting of the Snark as a nonsense ballad for children, it is hard to imagine - in fact one shudders to imagine - a child of today reading and enjoying it.
Martin Gardner
#24. If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said.
Amanda Ripley
#25. Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading?
Ann Patchett
#26. When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.
Mem Fox
#27. My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.
Salman Rushdie
#28. I think children love reading, and they will make time for it if we put the right books into their hands. And I hope I get the chance to keep being one of the people that writes them.
Rick Riordan
#29. I prefer to write books for children instead of reading them. But I do strongly believe in childhood and in respecting childhood innocence. I don't like books for children that deal with adult themes.
Philip Kerr
#30. We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.
Lawrence Clark Powell
#31. Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read.
Marilyn Jager Adams
#32. Certainly, we do not need to be soothed and entertained always like children. He who resorts to the easy novel, because he is languid, does no better than if he took a nap.
Henry David Thoreau
#33. ~Reading a book is like looking through a window!
Zetta Hupf
#34. When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.
Paula Fox
#35. Inviting children as gospel learners to act and not merely be acted upon builds on reading and talking about the Book of Mormon and bearing testimony spontaneously in the home.
David A. Bednar
#36. Because of the very nature of the world as it is today, our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity.
Madeleine L'Engle
#37. Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.
A. S. W. Rosenbach
#38. Differences in reading ability between five-year olds and eight-year olds are caused primarily by the older children's possessing more knowledge, not by the differences in their memory capacities, reasoning abilities, or control of eye movements.
E.D. Hirsch Jr.
#40. With 'Stardust', I hope what I was doing is giving 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and 25-year-olds and 60-year-olds a chance to get the same sense of wonder, the same feeling, the same magic, that they got in reading the classic fairy tales as children.
Neil Gaiman
#41. To receive many blessings, read to your children from the womb to the tomb.
Joyce Herzog
#42. As parents, we have to find the time and the energy to step in and help our children love reading. We can read to them, talk to them about what they're reading, and make time for this by turning off the television set ourselves. Libraries are a critical tool to help parents do this.
Barack Obama
#43. Ghostly, in his mind, Ben heard the librarian reading to the little ones: Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge? The children lean forward, all the old fascination glistening in their eyes: will the monster be bested ... or will It feed?
Stephen King
#44. I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.
Alberto Manguel
#45. A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
C.S. Lewis
#46. We know that children need help to read, and the best time to start them reading is very young. We believe that when children see adults from all walks of life and from throughout the community reading to them, that is another opportunity for children to see the importance of reading.
Jane Bown
#47. If the traditional Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic) are the basics that we want our children to master academically, then reverence, respect, and responsibility are the three Rs that our children need to master for the sake of their souls and the health of the world.
Zoe Weil
#48. I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.
Al Yankovic
#49. In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school.
Jonathan Kozol
#50. When I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says Private - grownups keep out: a children sprawled on the bed, reading.
Anne Fadiman
#51. I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.
Mal Peet
#52. I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children ... do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is the gateway drug to other books you may prefer.
Neil Gaiman
#53. She talked in one of her memoirs of ignoring her little brother when she was supposed to be looking after him: I liked reading a book much more than I liked looking after him (and even now I like reading a book more than I like looking after my own children ... )
Jamaica Kincaid
#54. 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
#55. What I want is to try and get across the idea that reading for pleasure is so beneficial. And turn children on who have maybe been switched off reading or never found a love of it in the first place.
Malorie Blackman
#56. In all honesty, I didn't love reading when I was a kid. I'd rather be running around in the woods or doing my best to scare the pants off all the children in the neighborhood by pretending my house was haunted or making them play Bloody Mary in the bathroom.
Jennifer McMahon
#57. There's no such thing as a kid who hates reading. There are kids who love reading, and kids who are reading the wrong books.
James Patterson
#58. But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.
Vladimir Nabokov
#59. Reading aloud is the best advertisement because it works. It allows a child to sample the delights of reading and conditions him to believe that reading is a pleasureful experience, not a painful or boring one.
Jim Trelease
#60. Teaching children to read was one thing; keeping them interested in reading was something else.
Marva Collins
#61. Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don't even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that's wrong.
Judy Blume
#62. Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.
Emilie Buchwald
#63. Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
Mark Haddon
#64. No skill is more crucial to the future of a child than literacy.
Los Angeles Times
#65. Public swimming pools, recreation centers, summer reading programs, youth jobs programs - they are all shutting their doors. And they are all facilities and programs relied on most heavily by low-income children.
Darell Hammond
#66. Nothing would please us more than to see our beloved children form the habit of reading the Gospels - not merely from time to time, but every day.
Pope Pius X
#67. Children find prescriptive reading lists daunting, and they are a dangerous thing to have in schools.
Malorie Blackman
#68. Rising numbers of children enjoy reading and are increasingly likely to read outside the classroom, a study has found.
Anonymous
#69. Bedtime rituals for children ease the way to the elsewhere of slumber - teeth brushing and pajamas, the voice of a parent reading, the feel and smell of the old blanket or toy, the nightlight glowing in a corner.
Siri Hustvedt
#70. A tried and true way to get your children interested in books and reading is to read to them when they are young.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#71. I couldn't comprehend why she still hadn't stopped him because it's clearly every mother's responsibility to protect her children. After all, that's the trust that bonds a mother and her child together, forever
Veronika Gasparyan
#72. The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.
Elizabeth Bowen
#73. When I meet children at book signings, they'll bring me photos of when I first met them many years ago when they were reading my picture books, and now they're telling me how much they enjoy my novels.
Grace Lin
#74. It would be hard for me to overestimate the importance of reading. Nothing can expand the mind and heart like the magic al world of books. ... Our libraries are an essential resource for our children, our communities, and our future.
Danielle Steel
#75. I like to read fiction, and I particularly enjoy reading young adult fiction. But I also read children's books, adult books, current authors, and classics, but I like fiction the most.
James Howe
#76. Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy. The most powerful tool that we have to strengthen literacy is often the most underused and overlooked, and that is a child's own stories.
Pam Allyn
#77. All the homeschooling parents I know meet on a regular basis with other families. They organize field trips, cooking classes, reading clubs and Scout troops. Their children tend to be happy, confident and socially engaged.
Quinn Cummings
#78. Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.
Alison Gopnik
#79. If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
Roger McGough
#80. I didn't start working on children's books until I got a job at a book warehouse on the children's floor. When I started reading some of the books, I was so impressed.
Kate DiCamillo
#81. I don't read young adult or children's books, now that my grandchildren are beyond the age of my reading to them. I read reviews, and so I'm aware of what's out there. But I tend not to read the books.
Lois Lowry
#82. It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long, and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters from a wonderful book about some children in England that had a bed that took them places at night.
Ellen Gilchrist
#83. The public library my parents took me to in Fort Worth had the children's section next to the SF/F section, so I was reading adult SF/F at a very young age.
Martha Wells
#84. As children we read to escape - to enter fantasy worlds where a bespectacled boy can discover he's a wizard or a brave girl can find a magical passage through a wardrobe. But we also read to find reflections of ourselves.
Chelsey Philpot
#86. Erudition - that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic - is taught in the schools; but where is the more important quality, character, taught? Nowhere in particular. There is no authorized training for children in character.
Robert Baden-Powell
#87. Reading with children is an enormous gift to them. It's a great honor to invite children to read with adults.
Henri Nouwen
#89. Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage
Harper Lee
#90. Where once September seemed merely and quietly odd, staring out the window during Mathematics lectures and reading big colorful books under her desk during Civics, now the other children sensed something wild and foreign about her.
Catherynne M Valente
#91. My best ideas come to me at unexpected moments, like when I'm reading children's books to my kids (the pictures inspire me), shopping, driving somewhere, seeing different things.
Mary Engelbreit
#92. The skill, the art of literacy is a gift. To read is to watch in your mind as a single word explodes into a confetti of images. Truly, of all the gifts given to man, reading is most sacred, For from words come dreams and from dreams come great tomorrows.
Stephen Cosgrove
#93. I read a great deal as a child. A lot of children go through a phase of reading in a literally voracious way. It is their primary imaginative activity. Maybe that's an experience which is not so common any more with the presence of television in every home.
J.M. Coetzee
#94. Research shows us that children who are read to from a very early age are more likely to begin reading themselves at an early age. They're more likely to excell in school. They're more likely to graduate secondary school and go to college.
Laura Bush
#95. READING SHOULD NOT BE PRESENTED TO CHILDREN AS A CHORE OR A DUTY. IT SHOULD BE OFFERED TO THEM AS A PRECIOUS GIFT.
Kate DiCamillo
#96. Every time a written word is put to page it is the opportunity to expand our minds, whether we are the writer or the reader. Enjoy the journey wherever it may take you!
K. Lamb
#97. I'm not really interested in writing or reading about people who are nice and easy. I like the problem children.
Jami Attenberg
#98. Just go on reading, as well as you can, and be sure that when the children get the thrill of the story, for which you wait, they will be asking more questions, and pertinent ones, than you are able to answer.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
#99. Children have to be motivated to want to learn to read. Reading must not be taught simply as a school exercise.
Michael Morpurgo
#100. I guess I never grew up. I was still reading kids' books in high school and college. I was always interested in writing or illustrating children's books, and I started collecting out-of-print books when I was about 10 years old.
Michael Patrick Hearn
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