Science has shown that reading helps memory, empathy, and language skills. It opens new worlds in your mind. It allows you to experience things you might never encounter in real life. But reading does more than that. There is a mystical adventure of reading. And here are the quotes to prove it.
On Learning to Read
Oh, magic hour, when a child first knows she can read printed words!
— A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1943
When I say to a parent, “read to a child”, I don’t want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.
— Mem Fox
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
— Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.
—J.K. Rowling
The Mystical Adventure of Reading
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
—Stephen King
There is no frigate like a book, to take us lands away
— Emily Dickinson
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person …
—Carl Sagan
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom
—Robert Frost
The Value of Reading
You may have tangible wealth untold. Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be — I had a mother who read to me.
— Strickland Gillilan
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.
— Walt Disney
Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them.
— Neil Gaiman
I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.
— Frederick Douglass
On Having Lots of Books
I feel the need of reading. It is a loss to a man not to have grown up among books.
—Abraham Lincoln
Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.
—Arnold Lobel
Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.
— Dr. Seuss
The Need of Reading
To borrow from Abraham Lincoln, reading is a need. If your house has stacks of books in all the crannies and all the nooks, you feel that need. And most likely you feel the mystical adventure of reading for pleasure too. You can read about the book I got hooked on reading in my post “The Movie That Wasn’t.” Which book hooked you on reading?