Time spent reading, like time spent lo.. Daniel Pennac

Previous Daniel Pennac Quotes

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

Time

Download Copy Translate

Daniel Pennac

Profession: Author
Nationality: French

Some suggestions for you :

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

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 master my doubts now. I have fun with them, they're my travelling companions.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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!

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 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.

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.

Show all