Top 62 Literacy Reading Quotes
#1. Many of these new readers were not yet college-educated, but in terms of their seriousness about the world, their own literacy, and above all their ambitions for their children, they might as well have been.
David Halberstam
#3. That's just it, Eva said with a gleam in her eyes that matched the rhinestones on her glasses, you had to get somebody to teach you, to facilitate. Literacy wasn't like a piece of my mama's lemon cake you handed over to somebody on a plate.
Minrose Gwin
#4. The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we're visiting, life.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#5. No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn't understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.
Stanislaw Lem
#6. To put an arrogant 'famous' writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#7. Some say they get lost in books, but I find myself, again and again, in the pages of a good book. Humanly speaking, there is no greater teacher, no greater therapist, no greater healer of the soul, than a well-stocked library.
L.R. Knost
#8. As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across them, and repeat. Viola! Bookshelves!
Jan Karon
#9. These programs and reading series are the fruit of an intellectually exhausted literacy industry that lost its way long ago, even as we mutely accepted its misguided agenda - to complicate reading and literacy so that we will purchase its programs and materials.
Mike Schmoker
#10. It's our(As The Stars of the Sky Foundation, Inc.) passion and joy to read to children and improve literacy, as well as teach others about charity and the impact they can have in a child's life.
Soraya Diase Coffelt
#11. Literacy is inseparable from opportunity, and opportunity is inseperable from freedom. The freedom promised by literacy is both freedom from - from ignorance, oppression, poverty - and freedom to - to do new things, to make choices, to learn.
Koichiro Matsuura
#12. I realized that every lesson, conference, response, and assignment I taught must lead students away from me and toward their autonomy as literate people.
Donalyn Miller
#13. He longed for the little cabin and the sun-kissed sea - for the cool interior of the well-built house, and for the never-ending wonders of the many books.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#14. School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
#15. Who made you Queen of Literacy? Go sit in your car!
Jackson Pearce
#16. To speak without shame about books we haven't read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it.
Pierre Bayard
#17. How my life has been brought to undiscovered lands, and how much richer it gets - all from words printed on a page.... How a book can have 560 pages, but in only three pages change the reader's life.
Emoke B'Racz
#18. Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.
Tomie DePaola
#19. If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.
Francois Mauriac
#20. When you learn to read you will be born again ... and you will never be quite so alone again.
Rumer Godden
#21. If you grow up in a household where there are books, where you are read to, where parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins read for their own pleasure, naturally you learn to read. If no one close to you takes joy in reading, where is the evidence that it's worth the effort?
Carl Sagan
#22. Louis Braille created the code of raised dots for reading and writing that bears his name and brings literacy, independence, and productivity to the blind.
Bob Ney
#23. I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.
Tom T. Hall
#24. A lot of dyslexic kids are actually more intelligent than average and are very good, because they've got very good memories, at disguising the fact that they can't read or have got problems in reading and literacy.
Jackie French
#25. Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane Porter's cursive writing.
T.K. Naliaka
#26. I hope that as a totally literate human being that you don't even know what "illiteracy" is because it simply doesn't exist in your world.
Peter Davis
#27. Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing; consumption, not production.
Clive Thompson
#28. Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.
Vera Nazarian
#29. Every book is a children's book if the kid can read!
Mitch Hedberg
#30. One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
Carl Sagan
#31. The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.
Aberjhani
#32. 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
#33. SUPPORT LITERACY! A child who cannot read cannot text.
Ron Brackin
#35. Unlike modern military codes, ancient texts are almost never purposely misleading, purposely scrambled ... indeed, literacy was so uncommon until classical times that the very writing of a message sufficed to keep it from almost everybody.
E. J. W. Barber
#36. Back at home they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee - even the ones who'd never thought of opening a novel before. There's nothing like a shovelful of dirt to encourage literacy.
Margaret Atwood
#37. It's a sad state of affairs when we make fun of people for reading instead of making reading fun for people.
Jen Selinsky
#38. The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn't achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who's reading aloud - it's the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.
Mem Fox
#39. Frederick Douglass 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
#40. Universal literacy, taken for granted today, was a direct result of the Reformation's reemphasis upon the centrality of Bible reading,
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#41. The most effective reading teachers are teachers who read. According to Morrison, Jacobs, and Swinyard (1999), "Perhaps the most influential teacher behavior to influence students' literacy development is personal reading, both in and out of school" (p. 81).
Donalyn Miller
#42. ...it is very well worth while to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider - if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain - or perhaps might not have written at all.
Jane Austen
#43. 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
#45. We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.
Bill Drayton
#46. There is more to literacy than 'reading' and 'writing'.
Strive Masiyiwa
#47. No skill is more crucial to the future of a child than literacy.
Los Angeles Times
#48. No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.
Rebecca Solnit
#49. If you've ever wondered how many prisons need to operate withinin America, just look at the literacy rate. 60% of America's prison inmates are illiterate and 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems.
United States Dept. Of Education
#50. All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Everyone was literate as a matter of course. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that. It was there to read, and we read.
Katherine Ann Porter
#51. Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood
#52. Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?
Dorothy L. Sayers
#53. If you want to work on the core problem, it's early school literacy.
James L. Barksdale
#54. Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.
John Steinbeck
#55. 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
#56. All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been; it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
Thomas Carlyle
#57. The BBC's aim, along with schools, libraries and literacy groups, to involve more people in reading groups is an exciting idea and one that I hope will keep readers all over the UK exploring and sharing the wonderful world of books.
Tessa Jowell
#58. Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.
Hugh Mackay
#59. Literacy isn't just about reading, writing, and comprehension. It's about culture, professionalism, and social outlook.
Taylor Ellwood
#60. A relatively primitive village in which there are still real feasts, common artistic shared expressions, and no literacy at all is more advanced culturally and more healthy mentally than our educated, newspaper-reading radio-listening culture.
Erich Fromm
#61. With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
