When you buy a jacket, it's important the pockets are big enough for a paperback!
The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it.
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.
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.
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.
We human beings build houses because we're alive, but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable, but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place, but that no one can replace either.
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.
He was an echo chamber for all books, the physical incarnation of words, the book made human.
The children became their reciprocal angels: readers.
Rather than allowing a book's intelligence to speak through our mouths, we replace it with our own intelligence as we talk about it. Rather than acting as emissary for the book, we become guardians of the temple, boasting of its wonders in the very words that slam shut it's doors: Reading matters! Reading matters!
Each country thinks its school is in a specific crisis, without ever linking the school's crisis to that of the society around it.
A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself.
All it takes is one teacher - just one - to save us from ourselves and make us forget all the others.
Reading is an act of resistance. Against what? Against all constraints.
I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.
If reading isn't about communication, it is, in the end, about sharing. But a deferred and fiercely selective kind of sharing.
I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.
I master my doubts now. I have fun with them, they're my travelling companions.
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.
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.
