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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.

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Daniel Pennac

Daniel Pennac

Profession: Author
Nationality: French

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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.

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.

The children became their reciprocal angels: readers.

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

I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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

Each country thinks its school is in a specific crisis, without ever linking the school's crisis to that of the society around it.

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