10 Amazing Quotes That Remind Us Why We Read With Our Kids

Any parent can tell you — there are nights where reading just doesn’t seem that important. Maybe you’re too tired to read your kid’s favorite bedtime story for the nineteenth time in a row, or you’re sick of fighting with your son or daughter about why they should turn off the TV and crack open a good book instead. And that’s fine. It’s perfectly normal for parents to ask themselves from time to time, “What’s the big deal about reading?”

If you’re in this position and could use a little inspiration, a motivational rallying cry to pick up that next book, we’ve got you covered. Here are ten wonderfully insightful quotes from some great literary minds that will remind you why we read.

1. “If my books can help children become readers, then I feel I have accomplished something important.” –Roald Dahl

2. “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.” –Marcel Proust

3. “Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” –George Bernard Shaw

4. “Expand the definition of ‘reading’ to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It’s the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won’t read shark books forever.” –Jon Scieszka

5. “I believe we should spend less time worrying about the quantity of books children read and more time introducing them to quality books that will turn them on to the joy of reading and turn them into lifelong readers.”–James Patterson

6. “Access to books and the encouragement of the habit of reading: these two things are the first and most necessary steps in education and librarians, teachers and parents all over the country know it. It is our children’s right and it is also our best hope and their best hope for the future.” –Michael Morpurgo

7. “Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear.” –Judy Blume

8. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” –Neil Gaiman (paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton)

9. “Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift.” –Kate DiCamillo

10. “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, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”–Carl Sagan