Reading Quotes
There is more treasure in books than in all pirates’ loot on Treasure Island.
Walt Disney
Ultimately, we want teachers in all the content areas to understand that teaching
reading in their discipline is teaching the content, that the texts and ways of
talking about and interpreting those texts are at the heart of their discipline.
Cynthia Greenleaf
As we read text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier. We can go
into it as far as its words allow, embracing all their possible definitions; we can
bring other texts to bear upon it and to reflect it, as in a hall of mirrors; we can
construct another, critical text that will extend and illuminate the one we are
reading; but we cannot escape the fact that its language is the limit of the
universe.
Albeto Manguel
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot
read them.
Mark Twain
I have been learning to read all my life and I cannot yet say I have achieved the
goal.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Prior knowledge can account for more variation in reading performance than either
I.Q. or measured reading achievement.
P. Johnston and D. Person
If I were to do one thing to raise test scores, even on standardized tests, it would
be to build vocabulary. In chemistry, for example, students would write ‘Dilute the
solution with three milliliters of water’ rather than simply, ‘Add more water.’
Heidi Hayes Jacobs
Love for reading is not taught, it is created; not required, but inspired; not
demanded, but exemplified; not exacted, but quickened; not solicited, but
activated.
Russell Stauffer
Like scientists, proficient readers constantly entertain hypotheses about the
content communicated in the text.
T. Rasinski and N. Padak
Unfortunately…literature is treated more like information to be memorized and
tested than an experience to be enjoyed and appreciated.
J. Dugan
Test tomorrow.
7th Grade Teacher
A Postscript Standard Spooler usually runs on a piece of software connected to
your network. The spooler’s name appears when you access the chooser desk
accessory. Standard Spoolers let you take advantage of printer description files
(APD’s). The APD decides the printer configuration.
Computer Manual
Literacy is so fundamental that some people take it for granted. We can’t do that
because we know literacy is the gateway to success.
Susan Castillo
Literacy is not a luxury; it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet
the challenges of the 21st century, we must harness the energy and creativity of all
citizens.
Bill Clinton
Literacy is important because it enables pupils to gain access to the subjects
studied in school, to read for information and pleasure, and to communicate
effectively. Poor levels of literacy impact negatively on what pupils can do and how
they see themselves.
John Hertich
An excellent reading teacher without a well-coordinated program can only do so
much. In these situations, even the best of teachers can offer students only
isolated moments of engrossed learning and rich experience in an otherwise
disconnected series of classes.
Judith Langer
This year I started to enjoy reading because I’m learning how.
5th Grade Student
How could I understand anything about Vietnam? I couldn’t even find it on the map.
6th Grade Student
You’re dumb if you have to look back. Smart kids get it after the first reading.
8th Grade Student
I’d rather be punished then read a book.
7th Grade Student
Talking about books I can read has helped me enjoy reading.
5th Grade Student
The hardest part about reading is remembering what I’ve read.
9th Grade Student
I am not a speed-reader. I am a speed-understander.
Isaac Asimov
If the reading is too hard, I just get the Cliff Notes or skim through chapters. If
I can’t get the Cliff Notes, I just listen to what the teacher and kids in the class
say.
10th Grade Student
If teachers are going to make the process of reading visible, they can’t sit safely
at the edge. As older, more experienced readers, they have an obligation to talk
aloud about groping for understanding or reaching for a genuine reading.
Dennie Palmer Wolf
If someone could teach these kids how to read, I could teach them science.
High School Science Teacher
It really isn’t hard to avoid reading – you just ask someone what it means, or wait
for the teacher to explain it.
12th Grade Student
The science textbook is hard for me to read. It has a lot of information with
diagrams and pictures. All of these things are helpful to people who know the
subject, but to me it is very confusing.
11th Grade Student
That’s it? That’s how the book ends? I don’t even know what happened.
9th Grade Student
When I get stuck, I quit reading.
9th Grade Student
I read everything the same way. It doesn’t matter if it is my science book or
Sports Illustrated. What is the point? Reading is reading.
10th Grade Student
The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a
gymnast’s struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be
on the alert, must construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical
essay – the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.
Walt Whitman
Read widely and wildly.
Shelley Harwayne
The knowledge is now available to make worthwhile improvements in reading
throughout the United States. If the practices seen in the classrooms of the best
teachers in the best schools could be introduced everywhere, improvements in
reading would be dramatic.
Becoming a Nation of Readers
The assignment for tomorrow is Section 2, pages 183 to 188. Write out your
answers to seven review questions on page 188. You may use the rest of class time
to get started on this homework.
10th Grade Social Studies Class
Struggling readers are especially dependent on teachers to tell them what they
need to know.
Judith Irvin
These students might be termed “First down punters”, readers who come up to the
line of scrimmage in their text and decide to “punt” on first down rather than
running a play or two to see if anything might make sense. By bailing out early,
they hope that the teacher will shortcut the process and move directly into telling
them what is important.
Judith Irvin
Reading is the highway from the shadow to the sun.
Maya Angelou
The most logical place for instruction in most reading and thinking strategies is in
social studies and science rather than in separate lessons about reading. The
reason is that the strategies are useful mainly when the student is grappling with
important but unfamiliar content.
Becoming a Nation of Readers
“Sammy read: What do firemen do?
 make bread  put out fires  sing
He poked Willy. ‘Firemen get your head out when it’s stuck,’ he said.
‘My uncle had his stuck in a big pipe, and the firemen came and got it out. But none
of the boxes said that.’”
First Grade Takes a Test by Miriam Cohen
You can’t read a math textbook the same way you read a novel. That’s why teaching
students to read is more than just the work of language arts teachers.
Rachel Bilmeyer
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into
the other room and read a book.
Groucho Marx
Reading is declining among all groups, in every region, at every educational level and
within every ethnic group.
Educational Leadership
Boys lag behind girls one and a half years in reading and writing.
Educational Leadership
The tests used to measure reading achievement do not reflect recent advances in
our understanding of the reading process. If we are to foster effective
instruction, the discrepancy between what we know and what we measure must be
resolved.
S. Valencia and P.D. Pearson
You don’t have to read every day, just on the days you eat.
NAEP Report
Reading comprehension is the process of deriving meaning from text and is key to
learning in all content areas.
Rachel Bilmeyer
Vocabulary knowledge is the single most important contributing factor to reading
comprehension.
J.G. LaFlamme
The sense of a word…is the sum of all psychological events aroused in our conscious
by the word….A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in
different context, it changes its sense. The dictionary meaning of a word is no
more than a stone in the edifice of sense, not more than a potentiality that finds
diversified realization in speech.
L.S. Uygofsky
The idea that reading instruction and subject matter instruction should be
integrated is an old one in education, but there is little indication that such
integration occurs often in practice.
Becoming a Nation of Readers
The real world requires substantially higher reading proficiency levels than most
students possess.
Willard Daggett
We’ve taught children how to read but forgotten to teach them to want to read.
Jim Trealease
You may have tangible wealth untold; caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer
than I will you never be – I had a mother who read to me.
Strickland Gillilan
If reading aloud to children were common instead of a rarity, we’d be facing fewer
academic and social problems in this nation.
Jim Trelease
A learner is only a partial biologist, for instance, if he cannot read or write to
discover information and meaning in biology. When a student takes the results of
his or her observations about lobsters, reads, writes a draft, talks, reads, then
writes again, he or she learns what it is to think critically as a biologist.
John Guthrie
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Mortimer Adler
Direct teaching and modeling of the strategies and readers application of the
strategies to the text they hear and read increases the ability of students to
develop literal and inferential understanding, increase vocabulary, and make
connections between parts of a text, between separate texts, and between text
and personal experience.
Reading Framework – California
Public Schools
In a world constructed around the assumption that everyone has the basic skills of
literacy and where literacy and freedom are indissolubly linked, to be illiterate is
to be unfree.
Koichiro Matsuura
A positive dimension of our research is that all of our studies have demonstrated
that reading yields significant dividends for everyone – not just for the “smart
kids” or the more able learners.
A. Cunningham and K. Stanovich
This is an extremely complex problem, and the longer we let these kids go the more
serious the problem becomes. The problem exists because (after third grade) we
stop providing reading instruction, and the instruction we do provide is not what
they need.
Michael Kamil
Research shows that students who receive intensive, focused literacy instruction
and tutoring will graduate from high school and attend college in significantly
greater numbers than those not receiving such attention.
Scott Joftus
Reading has cognitive consequences that extend beyond its immediate task of
lifting meaning from a particular passage. Furthermore, these consequences are
reciprocal and exponential in nature. Accumulated over time – spiraling either
upward or downward – they carry profound implications for the development of a
wide range of cognitive capabilities.
Ann Cunningham and Keith Stanovich
The act of reading seems to be more powerful for vocabulary development than
direct instruction. Focused, efficient vocabulary as well as lots of reading is
essential for successful reading in the content areas.
R. Anderson and P. Freebody
Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings
feel more connected to one another.
Anna Quindlen
Some kids are born good readers and some kids aren’t. I’ve always been a bad
reader and I always will be. It’s too late for me.
8th Grade Student
There is nothing I did that made my good readers good and there is nothing I can
do to help my poor readers improve. If they can’t read well by sixth grade, it’s too
late.
8th Grade Teacher
Assigning students material they can’t read is a waste of time.
Cris Tovani
As recently as 150 years ago, literacy was defined and measured as the ability to
sign one’s signature as evidence of rudimentary reading and writing abilities.
J. Flood and D. Lapp
The difference between printed and electronic texts is substantial enough to alter
current conceptions of literacy.
D. Reinking
When teaching reading is everyone’s responsibility, no one seems to actually do it.
Judith Irvin
Every time I read a sentence, the sentence before disappears.
5th Grade Student
“Tell what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you
better if you told me what you reread.
Francois Mauriac
Books are the carriers of civilization, without books, history is silent, literature
dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Barbara Tuchman
In 1974 auto technicians were responsible for 5,000 pages of print, in 1999 it
increased to 5,000 pages, and by 2000 car mechanics needed to understand
1,000,000 pages of service manuals to fix an automobile. Students must be
equipped with strategic reading competencies to navigate in this information age.
Rachel Bilmeyer
Prior knowledge can account for more variation in reading performance than either
IQ
or measured reading achievement.
P. Johnson and D. Pearson
While researchers stress the importance of balance between narrative and
informative reading in the elementary school, studies have shown that as much as
90% of what is read at the elementary level is narrative in nature. Students who
are taught with only literary text become incompetent comprehenders of
informative texts. They wait for the story to seize their interest when they
should be focused on main points and sequence.
Rachel Bilmeyer
Reading is the highway from the shadow to the sun.
Maya Angelou
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Mortimer Adler
To read is to empower.
Jane Evershed
Why do readers struggle? The problem is not illiteracy, but comprehension. The
bulk of older struggling readers and writers can read, but cannot understand what
they have read!
Reading Next Report
Stopping reading instruction at 3rd grade is like a builder who builds a foundation
and then stops and leaves the walls, plumbing, roof, etc. for the homeowner.
Bob Wise
Reason would tell almost anyone that the ability to read was the most difficult
single accomplishment ever achieved by any man. But in this day people did not set
off skyrockets and dance in the streets when their little boy tackled and subdued
this Everest of culture at the age of nine or ten. Nor did they reward the kids
patient teacher with rubies and a crown of laurel. It was more like rubles and a
crown of poison oak. Learning to read was taken with little more enthusiasm in the
average family than the regular defrosting of the automatic refrigerator.
Learning was expected; only failure to learn caused family comment.
Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be
painstakingly bolted on.
D. McGuiness
Reading is one of the most uniquely human and complex of all cognitive activities.
P. Vanden Broek and K.E. Kremer
One of the most heartbreaking sights in American schools today is that of children
– once so eager to read – discovering that they are not learning how. There comes
over those sparkling eyes a glaze of listless despair.
We are not talking about a few children and scattered schools. We are talking
about millions of children and every school in the nation. And the toll in young
spirits is the least of it. The toll in the learning and thinking potential of our
citizenry is beyond measure.
Sylvia Farnham-Diggory
We can, whenever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of
interest to us. We already know more than we need to. Whether or not we do it
must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far.
Ron Edmunds
Despite a significant body of research suggesting the effectiveness of strategy
instruction, especially for lower-achieving readers, strategy instruction has not
been implemented in many American classrooms.
J. Dole
Without diminishing the importance of good early reading instruction or what the
children with disabilities face when reading, I would like to assert that many “poor
readers” are actually lazy readers. This is not a reflection on their character. It’s
simply that no one ever told these children that reading was going to be work.
Students turn on their stereos, kick back on theirs beds, and expect the book to
transfer information from its pages to their brains.
C. Jago
Teaching reading is rocket science.
Louisa Moats
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to
read.
Groucho Marx
If you can read this, thank a teacher.
Anonymous
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Joseph Addison
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading
them.
Ray Bradbury
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke
Surviving and thriving as a professional today demands two new approaches to the
written word. First, it requires a new approach to orchestrating information, by
skillfully choosing what to read and what to ignore. Second, it requires a new
approach to integrating information, by reading faster and with greater
comprehension.
Jimmy Calano
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old
age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Robertson Davies
Never judge a book by its movie.
J. W. Eagan
It is a mistake to think that books have come to stay. The human race did without
them for thousands of years and may decide to do without them again.
E.M. Forster
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
W. Fusselman What a school thinks about its library is a measure of what it feels
about education.
Harold Howe
There should be a little voice in your head like the storyteller is saying it. And if
there’s not, then you’re just lookin’ at the words.
9th Grade Student
What is reading, but silent conversation.
Walter Savage Landor
You’ve really got to start hitting the books because it’s no joke out here.
Spike Lee
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, even if it is but a single sentence. If
you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.
Horace Mann
Life happened because I turned the pages.
Alberto Manguel
A library is thought in cold storage.
Herbert Samuel
Why pay a dollar for a bookmark? Why not use the dollar for a bookmark?
Fred Stoller
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to
read.
Mark Twain
Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
Bert Williams
A library is a hospital for the mind.
Anonymous
I read my way out of poverty long before I worked myself out of poverty.
Walter Anderson
Reading does not teach you how to read. It teaches you how to read better.
Anonymous
WARNING: Reading may lead to an increase in knowledge, altered perceptions, and
deepened insight. All such reactions are normal, but may lead to a serious reading
habit.
Anonymous
Am I supposed to do these reading strategy things consciously or unconsciously?
Because if I’m supposed to do them without thinking, I’m in trouble.
12th Grade Student
In our classrooms we need to be honest about the needs of our students. If they
can’t read the text, it’s not fair to simply assign the reading. Nor is it fair to give
up and skip reading entirely, favoring an approach that focuses solely on content
learning. This may help students to pass a particular course, but it won’t help them
in the long run.
Author Unknown