Quotes About Reading Aloud

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. As he leans over to kiss me good night, I do not regret having graduated from the amorous sprints of our youths. Marriage is a long-distance course, and reading aloud is a kind of romantic Gatorade formulated to invigorate the occasionally exhausted racers.

Anne Fadiman

#4. In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.

Marshall McLuhan

#5. Much of my reading time over the last decade and a half has been spent reading aloud to my children. Those children's bedtime rituals of supper, bath, stories, and sleep have been a staple of my life and some of the best, most special times I can remember.

Louise Brown

#6. The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.

Jim Trelease

#7. It's a bad dream: my English teacher is standing naked at the foot of this slightly lumpy bed, clutching a pair of not-quite-white underpants in his hand, studying me with this creepy look on his face, the one he gets when he's reading aloud in class and wants us to think he's moved by the passage.

Tom Perrotta

#8. My best guess is that my garbled allusion to Ezra Pound in the following must have come from my parents' reading aloud. The Askari fell off the ostrich In the rain Huge sing Goddamn And what became of the ostrich? Huge sing Goddamn

Richard Dawkins

#9. I always have music on unless I'm reading aloud, which I always do before I hand anything in. It's the only way to know if a sentence really works, without clunks or cul-de-sac clauses.

Anna Quindlen

#10. Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.

Mem Fox

#11. A felon could plead "benefit of clergy" and be saved by [reading aloud] what was aptly enough termed the "neck verse", which was very usually the Miserere mei of Psalm 51.

William Hazlitt

#12. Reading aloud is different from just following sentences with your eyes. Something quite unexpected wells up in your mind, a kind of indefinable resonance that I find impossible to resist.

Haruki Murakami

#13. An hour or two spent in writing from dictation, another hour or two in reading aloud, a little geography and a little history and a little physics made the day pass busily.

Hudson Stuck

#14. There was never a mention, never a declaration or a decision. But the long hours of talking stopped. No more reading aloud, or music, or films. And after that there was simple physical affection, the two walking arm in arm, or Maharet at her reading with Mekare sitting motionless on a bench nearby.

Anne Rice

#15. Reading aloud means no skipping, no skimming, no cutting to the chase.

Anne Fadiman

#16. Nothing from the summer carries more lasting allure for me than the memory of sitting with Ruth on the bank of a stream on campus, taking turns reading aloud from the books we held on our laps, while the wind wet leaves gossiping in the old trees above us and the creek rustled in its stony bed.

Scott Russell Sanders

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. The act of love and the act of poetry
Are not compatible
With the reading aloud of a newspaper

Andre Breton

#20. Books are mute as far as sound is concerned. It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two 'languages.' It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves.

Maria Montessori

#21. With twins, reading aloud to them was the only chance I could get to sit down. I read them picture books until they were reading on their own.

Beverly Cleary

#22. As time goes by the memories of sitting on the edge of a bed and reading aloud with your kid are going to be very meaningful in your own mental scrapbook.

Gary Ross

#23. She read aloud, as she understood better that way. In reading aloud you assume authority for what you are reading. There are people who read very loudly, and who appear to be giving their word of honor for what they are reading.

Victor Hugo

#24. Teachers have almost stopped reading aloud to their classes because of the pressure of testing and tight curricula, but it is the books we read together and talk about together that bring us closer together.

Katherine Paterson

#25. An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.

Robert Pinsky

#26. You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.

Janet Fitch

#27. These are the very questions that some are asking, especially those who are reading this book aloud.

Matthew David Brozik

#28. Even though poetry was written for the 'minds ear' as well as the physical ear, the minds ear can be trained only by the other ... which comes back to reading poetry aloud ...

Yvor Winters

#29. Dad used to read aloud to us from Dickens and Kipling. My tastes were omnivorous. I read anything I could lay my hands on, but the memory that stays with me is that of my father reading the Jungle Books to us when we were young. Beautiful stories!

A.B. Guthrie Jr.

#30. Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.

Alberto Manguel

#31. One way to be aware of it, to teach to yourself, is simply to read work aloud. I love reading the endings of books aloud when I start nearing the end.

Paul Lisicky

#32. Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

Allen Ginsberg

#33. Yes, I cried at the end of it. I did then, and I have every time since. Even a reading of the story aloud will bring tears to my eyes. In my opinion, anyone who isn't moved by it is less than human inside.

Patrick Rothfuss

#34. I try to make what I have written tighter, stronger and more precise, eliminating every element that's not doing useful work. Then I go over it once more, reading it aloud, and am always amazed at how much clutter can still be cut.

William Zinsser

#35. His father read aloud, quietly, his voice steady and gentle, while he pressed a hand to Liam's delicate back, supporting his position.
...
She realized Dragos was reading the quarterly profit percentages from a stockholders' report.

Thea Harrison

#36. Oh my God, I can't believe I actually said that out aloud.
Neither could he. The fact that she saw him as so sexually appealing was enough of a surprise to render him speechless. He was numb. Even the dissonance cut off - likely reading his reaction as one of complete unemotionality.

Nalini Singh

#37. If I'm made to pick one transcendent reading experience, then it was listening to Miss Sarzin as - if we'd been very, very good - she read the next chapter of 'The Hobbit' aloud to us.

Karen Joy Fowler

#38. It's amazing how many people think a conversation is little more than reading their resume aloud.

Marshall Thornton

#39. Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr.

Lance Morrow

#40. I is reading it hundreds of times,' the BFG said. 'And I is still reading it and teaching new words to myself and how to write them. It is the most scrumdiddlyumptious story.'
Sophie took the book out of his hand. 'Nicholas Nickleby,' she read aloud.
'By Dahl's Chickens,' the BFG said.

Roald Dahl

#41. And so he was reading the story as if it were a spell and the words of it, spoken aloud, could make magic happen.

Kate DiCamillo

#42. Reading one's own poems aloud is letting the cat out of the bag. You may have always suspected bits of a poem to be overweighted, overviolent, or daft, and then, suddenly, with the poet's tongue around them, your suspicion is made certain.

Dylan Thomas

#43. I think the most reliable way to teach it is through reading work aloud over and over. Many prose writers been encouraged to do that, but that might be changing. Denise was the one who taught me to develop my ear. I never knew how to listen to writing until she started reading her work to me.

Paul Lisicky

#44. What are blue-stockings?' asked Tommy.
Naturally you don't know,' replied the other. 'If you did, you would sympathize more with Bluebeard. They were ladies who were always reading books. They even read them aloud.

G.K. Chesterton

#45. When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web.

Jodi Picoult

#46. At night his most frequent recurring dream was of doing The Times crossword puzzle; his most disagreeable that he was reading a tedious book aloud to his family.

Evelyn Waugh

#47. Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.

Charles Stross

#48. I cannot say why, but the simple act of reading it aloud allows you to let go of it. Do not forget this. Believe me, it helps. At first it is a very scary thing to do.

Natalie Goldberg

#49. If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.

Frank Delaney

#50. Betsy liked to read her stories aloud and she read them like an actress. She made her voice low and thrillingly deep. She made it shake with emotion. She laughed mockingly and sobbed wildly when the occasion required.

Maud Hart Lovelace

#51. To receive many blessings, read to your children from the womb to the tomb.

Joyce Herzog

#52. Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

Douglas Dunn

#53. She liked to watch her father as he read, and to listen to the smoothly rolling tones; she felt no curiosity about what the words meant. It was only Shakespeare and she was used to him.

Stella Gibbons

#54. What are you reading?" she asked as he poured himself scotch and her a vodka. She looked over to the deserted volume. "Stories and Legends of Pagan Russia," she read aloud. "Are you catching up on Yvan's biography?

Amy Kuivalainen

#55. ... if necessary, the books shall be divided as follows:
you get the odd, I get the even pages;
"the books" are understood to mean the ones we used to read aloud
together, when we would interrupt our reading for a kiss,
and would get back to the book after half an hour ...

Vera Pavlova

#56. I found many ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse before reading anything aloud to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words.

Philip Schultz

#57. I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

Andrew Clements

#58. Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

Seamus Heaney

#59. We are a stoic, reserved bunch who hide our emotions well - except when reading a terribly sad or poignant story, of course. I have been known to sob aloud at a tragic ending.

Lynn Austin

#60. inscription, which reads in part, HINC CINERES TANTI HOMINIS RESURRECTIONEM MORTUORUM EXPECTANT RIP. Arthur heard Claire reading the dedication aloud then translating, "From the ashes of so great a man look for the resurrection of the dead. Rest in peace.

Glenn Cooper

#61. At my age an hour's reading before bedtime is essential, and I wisely brought Pamela with me. If any of you has trouble sleeping, I will read aloud to you. I never yet knew anyone who could not fall asleep with Richardson being read aloud to him.

Shirley Jackson

#62. Reading any piece of writing aloud is an acid test, particularly when it comes to dialogue. There were writers I'd always admired who suddenly rang false when I spoke their words in our living room.

Anne Tyler

#63. If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

Anne Fadiman

#64. The only things that got me through those years were a half dozen books I stole and through which I escaped reality time and again. I never tired of reading them, even reading them aloud to myself, until the characters between the covers became dear to me, like old friends.

Sylvie Grohne

#65. Reading your own material aloud forces you to listen.

Stephen Ambrose