READ OR DIE
[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
Reading. It's our only hope.
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it. ~ Adrienne Rich
Reading is not optional. ~ Walter Dean Myers
Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk. ~ Lemony Snicket
A library is a hospital for the mind.
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. ~ W. Somerset Maugham
Can't, I'm booked.
A little reading is all the therapy a person needs sometimes.
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. ~ Harper Lee
A well-read woman is a dangerous creature. ~ Lisa Kleypas
I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
“Our illiterates have been the victims of educated scoundrels who have taken advantage of their ignorance. The only way to lift people is to teach them to lift themselves. Literacy is the only road to true freedom. … Literacy is the means to many good ends. And these ends are not just the immediate practical ones, but literacy gives a voice to the silent. … Only a literate people can have a truly democratic government.” ~ Suzanne Woods Fisher, The Moonlight School
fREADom
"Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that nigger [speaking of myself] how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable and be of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty - to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. ~ Frederick Douglass
Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad’s teachings, my correspondence, my visitors—usually Ella and Reginald—and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life. … I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. ~ Malcolm X
By the time I was thirteen, I had read myself out of Harlem. ~ James Baldwin
The achievement gap is a relative measurement, pertaining to comparisons between groups. Illiteracy is absolute and personal. If you can’t read, what does it matter who can? If some new age of social utopia dawned tomorrow, you’d still be working at its gas station. ~ Andrew X. Evans
“… if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupified by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves….” ~ George Orwell, 1984
“Thomas More paid for Tyndale's death,” he says. “He vowed he would follow him to the world's end. … Thomas More wrote his epitaph in his lifetime,” he tells her. “He was that sort of man.” Words, words, just words. “He wanted it engraved in stone: Terrible to heretics. He was proud of what he did. He thought if you let the people read God's word for themselves, Christendom would fall apart. There would be no more government, no more justice.” “He believed this? Truly?” “That we needed the constraint of ignorance? Yes.” “He did not give much credit to his fellow man.” ~ Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light
With all peoples the word and writing are holy and magical; naming and writing were originally magical operations, magical conquests of nature through the spirit, and everywhere the gift of writing was thought to be of divine origin. With most peoples, writing and reading were secret and holy arts reserved for the priesthood alone. ~ Hermann Hesse
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. ~ Helen Keller
For quite a while Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them, and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But one day she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word and the picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further, and when she saw "horse", she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read! From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends, and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence, and when she wanted to feel a closeness with someone, she could read a biography. On the day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived. ~ Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
“It's freedom. I can fly out of this place on the backs of books. I've gone to the end of the world on the wings of words.” ~ Dr. Minor speaking to Eliza, who’s illiterate, from the Professor and the Madman.
When a person learns how to read they will learn how to create their destiny and accomplish what they would like to do.
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one. ~ George R. R. Martin
Trying to function in life without books is like getting a root canal without novocaine.
People who don't read books confuse and fascinate me at the same time. What do you do with your time? What do you talk about? What do you spend your money on? How do you live without reading? I don't understand.
Reading is freedom
[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[