Quotes About Child Reading

#1. 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

#2. if you're reading this book, then you're also that child reading by flashlight and dreaming of other worlds. Don't be scared of her, that inner Beauty, or her dreams. Let her out. She's you, and she's me, and she's magic. There's

Meagan Spooner

#3. If you are concerned for the future of our civilization, there is no more cheering sight than a boy or girl who is lost in a book. It's an image I cling to, in moments of depression: the absorbed child, reading.

Susan Cooper

#4. Think of me, the uneducated child reading books in my room at 22 Hyde Park Gate
now advanced to this glory ... Yes; all that reading, I say, has borne this odd fruit. And I am pleased.

Virginia Woolf

#5. I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China.

John Steinbeck

#6. For a child, reading a book can be such an intense experience.

Michelle Paver

#7. I think reading is a gift. It was a gift that was given to me as a child by many people, and now as an adult and a writer, I'm trying to give a little of it back to others. It's one of the greatest pleasures I know.

Ann M. Martin

#8. SUPPORT LITERACY! A child who cannot read cannot text.

Ron Brackin

#9. My idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window.

Gail Caldwell

#10. I have known Farley Mowat all of my life, from reading his books as a child to becoming a close friend of his over the last three decades.

Paul Watson

#11. The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...

Bruno Bettelheim

#12. No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.

Katherine Rundell

#13. 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

#14. I am positive I was not a neglected child. I remember reading 'The Jungle Book' and 'The Sleeping Beauty.'

Keri Russell

#15. She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn't taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

Cornelia Funke

#16. 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

#17. As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.

Norman Spinrad

#18. I hope to instill, in every child I meet, my love and enthusiasm for reading and stories.

Malorie Blackman

#19. I am ashamed to say this, but as a child, neither my parents not my teachers pushed me to read. In fact, I did not read an entire book through until I was a grown man and had learned the awesome power of reading on my own.

Daniel Whyte III

#20. 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

#21. [Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.

Robin McKinley

#22. Imagination in the child is powerful. Reading and laughter and love are essential in our lives.

Malachy McCourt

#23. 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

#24. When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.

Marilynne Robinson

#25. I think my mother's and Granny's storytelling had had the same effect upon me when a child, as the reading of books: my mind was stimulated, my creativity encouraged.

Mark Mathabane

#26. 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

#27. A literary expert friend once told me that the way to teach your child to love and respect reading is not to read to them, but rather to refuse to allow yourself to be interrupted while you're reading.

Karen Karbo

#28. I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child.

Diane Setterfield

#29. 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

#30. Reading was a huge part of my life as a child - we were a family of storytellers.

Sue Monk Kidd

#31. I often find that once a child unlocks the secret of words, they hunger for them. There is a kind of magic in reading. It takes the mind to places where the body may not go, allowing one to forget, for a while, life's troubles.

Liana LeFey

#32. What I did do a lot as a child was read, and I particularly remember reading all the 'Hardy Boys' books, a set of history books called the 'Landmark Books,' and a series of science books called the 'All About Books.'

Martin Chalfie

#33. 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

#34. The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.

Lewis Buzbee

#35. 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

#36. Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names of things. The glorious inrush of a word. The joy of chatter. Every color's wavelength, by number.

Kim Stanley Robinson

#37. As a father, I understand the importance of the bond that develops through reading picture books with your child.

Anthony Browne

#38. My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?

Barbara Corcoran

#39. We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.

Bill Drayton

#40. I think that what we need to do is say, 'Reading is going to really affect your life.' You take a black man who doesn't have a job, but you say to him, 'Look, you can make a difference in your child's life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.' That's what I would like to do.

Walter Dean Myers

#41. No skill is more crucial to the future of a child than literacy.

Los Angeles Times

#42. Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading.

Maria Montessori

#43. 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

#44. The child lives in the book; but just as much the book lives in the child.

Elizabeth Bowen

#45. I had TB as a child. So I was put to doing things like drawing and reading. And I was raised in a family where manners were important. Maybe that's why I seem so refined.

Katherine Helmond

#46. I just ... my childhood seems, when I look back, to be largely composed of reading, lying on the bed. I mean, my mother was always shouting, 'Go outside!' But she shouted it at all of us. I think I was just kind of ... rather an introverted child, probably.

Helen Garner

#47. If a big person invests time in reading, kids learn reading is important, the child is important, words are important, stories are important.

Gail Carson Levine

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Substituting formal reading instruction for read-alouds is like showing a child how to grow flowers by providing a hoe to dig holes but neglecting to provide the seeds or to take the time to watch those seeds grow.

Steven L. Layne

#51. Reading to small children is a specialty.

Clifton Fadiman

#52. What is for sale, what is not? If we really think that making your apologies to your wife or reading a bedside story to your child are activities that we can pay a stranger to do, then, without moralising, what has happened to us?

Arlie Russell Hochschild

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. My interest in books started as a child. I had a voracious appetite for reading. It's my mom's fault really, because she read to us a lot, and I loved it.

Catherine Cruzan

#56. My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.

John Updike

#57. Reading is one of the best ways to bond with your child. Bond this Christmas with "It's Not About You, Mr. Santa Claus

Soraya Diase Coffelt

#58. 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

#59. Every child should be taught how to read, write and think.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#60. ...as a child, I was an avid reader. And despite reading hundreds of books about straight people, I did not grow up to embrace the heterosexual lifestyle. Similarly, someone who is heterosexual is not going to turn gay from reading a book that features a child being raised by two moms.

Leslea Newman

#61. I've discovered writers by reading books left in airplane seats and weird hotels.

Lee Child

#62. I did not like Ravenscliff by instinct, but I was beginning to find him fascinating. A book-reading, socialist-sympathising, child-begetting capitalist fraud.

Iain Pears

#63. You never forget the books you loved as a kid. You never forget the poems you memorized, the first book you read until the cover fell off, the book you read hidden from your mother. What an honor to hold hands with a child's imagination in this way.

Meg Medina

#64. Perhaps,' I wearily suggest, 'reading is the opiate of the educated classes.' 'Is it? Are you thinking of becoming a flower child?' he says, lighting up a new cigar.

Philip Roth

#65. When she was pregnant with Teddy, she feared that she'd give birth to a child who disliked reading. It would be like giving birth to a foreign species.

J. Courtney Sullivan

#66. Reading is important.
Books are important.
Librarians are important. (Also, libraries are not child-care facilities, but sometimes feral children raise themselves among the stacks.)

Neil Gaiman

#67. There is still in many schools complete misapprehension that children with reading difficulties are stupid. It is so easy to teach a child that they're dumb. There needs to be a recognition that you need different ways to teach children who have got reading problems.

Jackie French

#68. If you want to see and feel magic first hand, read a book to your kid before bedtime. - Richard Due

Richard Due

#69. You have to be very clear with yourself about how you're going to spend your time. When a child is at school or napping, you need to realize that this is your writing time and you don't spend it surfing the Internet or reading.

Elizabeth Hoyt

#70. As a child, I was very shy. Painfully, excruciatingly shy. I hid a lot in my room. I was so terrified to read out loud in school that I had to have my mother ask my reading teacher not to call on me in class.

Kim Basinger

#71. Reading to children at night, responding to their smiles with a smile, returning their vocalizations with one of your own, touching them, holding them - all of these further a child's brain development and future potential, even in the earliest months.

T. Berry Brazelton

#72. You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

Dr. Seuss

#73. I believe in any kid's ability to read any book and form their own judgments. It's the job of a parent to guide his/her child through the reading of every book imaginable. Censorship of any form punishes curiosity.

Sherman Alexie

#74. The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading.

Sandra Day O'Connor

#75. Of the autistically interior, dreaming, reading, erotic, self-sufficient child in Balthus' painting we have practically no image at all. Balthus' children are not being driven to succeed where their parents failed, or to be popular, adjusted, or a somebody.

Guy Davenport

#76. Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before.

Agatha Christie

#77. I wanted to become a writer. I enjoyed reading as a child.

Goh Chok Tong

#78. As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

Mary Oliver

#79. Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words.

Betty Smith

#80. Focusing on the way I look makes me uncomfortable. I try to focus on the way I feel - I know what makes me feel better about myself. Reading my child a story makes me feel great, doing my hair nicely doesn't.

Elle Macpherson

#81. I still carry the residue of the pressure I felt as a child to read and appreciate the right books. Growing up, I never allowed myself to read beach reading. I was always plowing through Ford Madox Ford's 'Good Solider' or something I wasn't equipped to understand.

Noah Baumbach

#82. I'm beginning to think that you aren't with child. You've simply become fat after reading too many recipes.

Meljean Brook

#83. When you read with your child, you show them that reading is important, but you also show them they're important - that they are so important to you that you will spend 20 minutes a day with your arm around them.

Laura Bush

#84. As hardly anything can accidentally touch the soft clay without stamping its mark on it, so hardly any reading can interest a child, without contributing in some degree, though the book itself be afterwards totally forgotten, to form the character.

Richard Whately

#85. If I were you," Tom said, "I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic." "But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?" Tom held up his hands. "I'm sorry, you're losing me." Mary exhaled smoke. "Possibly I am.

Chris Cleave

#86. For bedtime reading, I usually curl up with a good monograph on quantum physics or string theory, my specialty. But since I was a child, I have been fascinated by science fiction. My all-time favorite is 'The Foundation Trilogy,' by Isaac Asimov.

Michio Kaku

#87. I was a very difficult child, and the time I spent reading was about the only peace I gave my mother.

Kate Beckinsale

#88. I don't want to approach reading from the viewpoint of that it's a pleasant adjunct to your life. I want to approach it from the idea that you have to read or you're going to suffer. There's a difference to be made - and you can make it if you read with your child.

Walter Dean Myers

#89. When I was a child I read books for entertainment and information; I now think of books as lifeboats.

Alice Walker

#90. Your child with dyslexia is twice as likely as other children to have ADD; about 15 percent of students with reading problems are also diagnosed with ADD. Conversely, a child with ADD is twice as likely to have difficulties with reading; about 36 percent of children with ADD also have dyslexia. It

Jody Swarbrick

#91. As an only child lacking siblings and playmates, I was alone a great deal of the time. Much of this was spent reading virtually anything I could get my hands on.

Robert Lefkowitz

#92. From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate little volumes.

Benjamin Franklin

#93. There's a different flavor to children's literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.

Mizuki Nomura

#94. Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read.

Lemony Snicket

#95. Women of child-bearing age steadily run out of eggs by the continuous process of cell death. While reading a copy of the 'Guardian' carefully from cover to cover, a normal woman will have lost on average two eggs - while, typically, a normal man will have made 70,000 new sperm.

Robert Winston

#96. Fairy tales opened up a door into my imagination - they don't conform to the reality that's around you as a child. I started reading when I was three and read everything, but I wanted to be an actress.

Kate Atkinson

#97. If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.

Michael Sandel

#98. Oh, I guess I'm physically able to father a child. That's not what I'm thinking. I'm too closely married to a quiet reading lamp.

John Steinbeck

#99. Reading about Queen Victoria has been a passion of mine since, as a child, I came across Laurence Housman's play 'Happy and Glorious,' with its Ernest Shepard illustrations.

A. N. Wilson

#100. Give the child good books, then let it alone! Don't plough and harrow its brain, or stretch it on Procrustes-beds of standardization, simplification, and what not!

Laura E. Richards