Teen Literacy Tips

I’m always on the lookout for thought-provoking ideas in the form of quotes. I use them for bulletin boards, for classroom posters and to give to students for them to paraphrase and discuss. Here’s a short selection of quotes about reading for you to consider as you decorate your classroom:

• “The writings of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.” Walter Savage Landor
• “It is with books as with men, a very small number play a great part: the rest are confounded with the multitude.” Voltaire
• “Books never annoy; they cost little, and they are always at hand, and ready at your call.” William Cobbett
• “When others fail him, the wise man looks to the sure companionship of books.” Andrew Lang
• “One can be amused or excited by a book that one’s intellect simply refused to take seriously.” George Orwell
• “We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.” Robert Coover
• “To read a book properly is to wake up and live, to acquire a renewed interest in one’s neighbors, more especially those who are alien to us in every way.” Henry Miller
• “The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.” Eudora Welty
• “People who don’t read are brutes.” Eugene Ionesco
• “Through engagement with others, literature lets us imagine what it would be like to be different.” Denis Donoghue
• “There is nothing more disgusting than the taste of a rotten book and nothing like the taste of a good book; nothing like it, nothing.” Philip Roth