Why We Love Reading
Our mission at Zinc is to equip middle and high school students with the skills they need to comprehend complex texts AND to get them to enjoy reading as much as we do. We’re not alone in our appreciation of the written word. Authors, icons, and politicians alike praise the power of texts to transform their minds and lives. This Valentine’s Day, we’ve curated a selection of our favorite quotes on the love of reading.
“Reading is a form of prayer, a guided meditation that briefly makes us believe we’re someone else, disrupting the delusion that we’re permanent and at the center of the universe. Suddenly (we’re saved!) other people are real again, and we’re fond of them.” – George Saunders
“We read to know we are not alone.” – C.S. Lewis
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” – James Baldwin
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” – Joan Didion
“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” – Rene Descartes
“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” – Carl Sagan
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” – Cicero
“Some books leave us free, and some books make us free.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” – Fran Lebowitz
“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” – Jhumpa Lahiri
“Reading is important. If you know how to read, then the whole world opens up to you.” – Barack Obama
“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.” – Maya Angelou
“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglass