I thought I would provide quotations about books, especially the ones that pertain to the love of reading children’s books. Enjoy!

“Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.” Oprah Winfrey

“Every reader of A Cat in the Hat will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information: what private demon or desires compelled this mother to leave two small children at home all day, with the front door unlocked, under the supervision of a fish.” Louis Menand, The New Yorker, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of A Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss

“There is more treasure in books then in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island…and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.”Walt Disney

“Words have a power beyond their meaning. I remember the stories of my childhood but I remember the single words that shone out of fairy stories milk and buns, a flask of wine, a cabbage cut fresh from the garden….I would read again stories that frightened me, for the sake of such perceptions. They seem to echo an older life, beyond my knowing.” Pamela Brown

“I read because my father read to me. And because he’d read to me, when my time came I knew intuitively there is a torch that is supposed to be passed from one generation to the next. And through countless nights of reading, I began to realize that when enough of the torchbearers parents and teachers stop passing the torches, a culture begins to die.” Jim Trelease

“There is a space on everyone’s bookshelves for books one has outgrown but cannot give away. They hold our youth between their leaves, like flowers pressed on a half-forgotten summer’s day.” Marion Garretty

“I read A Wrinkle in Time three times in a row once, when I was twelve, because I couldn’t bear for it to end.” Anna Quindlen

One of the greatest gifts adults can give- to their offspring and to their society- is to read to children.” Carl Sagan

“I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.” Anne Tyler

“I am part of all that I have read.” John Kieran

“Anyone who read Catcher in the Rye or The Outsiders as an adolescent will remember how those books crystallize the conflicting emotions, the yearning for security and the need to rebel, so endemic to that stage of life.” Bruce Handy

“One’s collection comes to symbolize the content one’s mind. Books read in childhood, in yearning adolescence, at college, and in the first self-conscious years of adulthood travel along, often, with readers as they move from house to house.” John Updike

“My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.” Dylan Thomas

“I know exactly how I felt when I first read The Brothers Karamazov. I can still taste the words, smell the air of a Russian winter.” Helen Thomson

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”F. Scott Fitzgerald

“When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.” Erica Jong

 

“Books are the keys to wisdom’s treasures;

Books are gates to the land of pleasure;

Books are paths that upwards lead;

Books are friends. Come, let us read”

Inscribed on Children’s Reading Room, Hopkington, MA

“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” Arthur Conan Doyle

“When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child’s hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.” Paula Fox

“The greatest blessing of my youth was that I grew up in a world of cheap and abundant books.”C.S. Lewis

“Few children learn to read books by themselves. Someone has to lure them into the wonderful world of the written word. Someone has to show them the way.” Orville Prescott

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to,, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself” Anna Quindlen

“My alma mater was books, a good libary…I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” Malcolm X

“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice…and just as a touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a person far distant in time and space, and hear them speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.” Gilbert Highet

‘No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” C.S.Lewis

 

“Books are where things are explained to you.

Life is where things are not.” Julian Barnes

 

“When I was little, maybe eight or nine, the books that made an enormous impression on me, and didn’t fade, were The Scarlet Pimpernel, A Tale of Two Cities, and all of the Superman comic books. They all involve the same idea, which is someone who is ineffective and foppish on the surface but powerful and effective and mysterious and unstoppable in secret….they encouraged me to develop the notion that you might appear one way but really be another.” Amy Bloom

“My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think of the books I read.” Jorge Luis Borges

“Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.”Emilie Buchwald

“I am sure I read every book of fairy tales in our branch library, with one complaint all that long, golden hair. Never mind- my short brown hair became long and golden as I read and when I grew up I would write a book about a brown-haired girl to even things up.” Beverly Cleary

“Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.” E.L.Doctorow

“Summers lasted forever when I was growing up in Texas. They were hot and they were muggy and they were very still- unless I happened to be sprawled belly-down on the linoleum with an oscillating fan tickling my toes and a Nancy Drew mystery under my nose. To my mind, that was as close to heaven as a Houston girl could get.” Dianne Donovan

“My mother and father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn’t believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn’t beleive that it was free.” Kirk Douglas

“What one reads becomes part of what one sees and feels.” Ralph Ellison

“My interest began as an interest in reading, which then was translated into an interest in writing…I can remember a Sunday school prize or something when I was about eleven years old; I won a copy of David Copperfield. Up to that time I’d read the Bobbsey Twins and then Tom Swift and the Rover Boys and Tarzan, but since I got this as a prize, I decided I should read it. I found a world that was realer than the world I lived in, unlike those Tarzan and other books. I knew David Copperfield better than anybody I knew in the real world, including myself.” Shelby Foote

“Your family sees you as a lazy lump lying on the couch, propping a book up upon your stomach, never realizing that you are in the middle of an African safari that has just been charged by elephants, or in the drawing-room of a large English country house interrogating the butler about the body discovered on the Aubusson carpet.” Cynthia Heimel

 

“A common complain is that children’s books, specially high-quality picture books, cost so much. All I can say is that they cost less than a dinner out or a new pair of jeans. The books I read as a child transformed me, gave meaning and perspective to my experiences, and helped to mould whatever imaginative, intellectual or creative strengths I can lay claim to now. No doll or game had that impact on me, no pair of jeans ever changed my life.” Michelle Landsberg

Resources used: Books and Reading: A book of quotations, edited by Bill Bradfield, Book Lovers Quotations, edited by Helen Exley