Previous
Daniel Pennac Quotes
Next

A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself.

Copy Translate
Daniel Pennac

Daniel Pennac

Profession: Author
Nationality: French

Some suggestions for you :

All it takes is one teacher - just one - to save us from ourselves and make us forget all the others.

The children became their reciprocal angels: readers.

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.

I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.

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.

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.

Time spent reading, like time spent loving, increases our lifetime.

The paradoxical virtue of reading lies in distancing ourselves from the world so that we may make sense of it.

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!

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.

He was an echo chamber for all books, the physical incarnation of words, the book made human.

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.

When you buy a jacket, it's important the pockets are big enough for a paperback!

Reading is an act of resistance. Against what? Against all constraints.

Show all