The paradoxical virtue of reading lies.. Daniel Pennac

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

Daniel Pennac

Profession: Author
Nationality: French

Some suggestions for you :

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Show all