Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

Illiteracy is the innability of a person to learn. It is not all about the innability to read or write as the middle class regards it.

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

I realized that every lesson, conference, response, and assignment I taught must lead students away from me and toward their autonomy as literate people.

A hundred years ago, an average teenager knew countless authors, and, a sex position or two. Today, an average teenager knows countless sex positions, and, an author or two.

scientifically illiterate.” That’s just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War—when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave...

Everyone’s talking about the death and disappearance of the book as a format and an object. I don’t think that will happen. I think whatever happens, we have to figure out a way to protect...

…And another item from the growing file of people who voluntarily wear dunce caps… You’ll be talking cordially to someone and make an offhand reference, ‘I recently read where–‘ and they’ll cut you off and...

Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.

Literacy is one of the greatest gifts a person could receive

With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.

When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present...

Read. Everything you can get your hands on. Read until words become your friends. Them when you need to find one, they will jump into your mind, waving their hands for you to pick them....

When you learn to read you will be born again…and you will never be quite so alone again.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments...

I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched...

Books are great meals for the mind!

I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons)...

The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.

To be unable to read was the ultimate measure of wretchedness.

Why does everyone have to pretend to be stupid and not know long words?

Every old man that dies is a library that burns.

Before Gutenberg, libraries were small — the Cambridge University library had only 122 volumes in 1424, for instance; after Gutenberg literacy became widespread.

These programs and reading series are the fruit of an intellectually exhausted literacy industry that lost its way long ago, even as we mutely accepted its misguided agenda – to complicate reading and literacy so...

I want to be a creature that’s half bee, half the letter B. That way I can pollinate the world with my literacy.

Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read!

No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn’t understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.

School made us ‘literate’ but did not teach us to read for pleasure.

Who made you Queen of Literacy? Go sit in your car!

Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift — to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of...

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at...

Even if you have to die tomorrow; die as a literate.

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane...

We need science education to produce scientists, but we need it equally to create literacy in the public. Man has a fundamental urge to comprehend the world about him, and science gives today the only...

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah’s ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need...

Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.

Grammar, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.

The value of universal literacy is of course questionable in a society that practices the strictest form of censorship.

Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?

No skill is more crucial to the future of a child than literacy.

To witness the awe of human beings delighting in their own hands forming the written word was humbling and he understood it profoundly at that moment watching those two, with the ancient land around them,...

There’s nothing more important than literary merit, and that’s why I not only created an award—the Julius Caesar Author of the Year Award—but I nominated myself as the first recipient. You can’t always wait for...

I think scientists have a valid point when they bemoan the fact that it’s socially acceptable in our culture to be utterly ignorant of math, whereas it is a shameful thing to be illiterate.

Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.

This is the book, then , and the book of Shakespeare. And every day you must read a page of each to your child–even though you yourself do not understand what is written down and...

Books on the bookshelvesAnd stacked on the floorBooks kept in basketsAnd propped by the doorBooks in neat pilesAnd in disarrayBooks tucked in closetsAnd books on displayBooks filling cranniesAnd books packed in nooksBooks massed in windowsAnd...

If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news...

Growing Literacy of the Heart and Mind Cultivates the Landscape of a Child’s Future.