top of page
.png){kind=small}
"A book won't move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. A book won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it-everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literacy quotes
"The highest paid Americans read an average of two to three hours per day. The lowest paid Americans don't read at all......58% of adults never read another book after they leave high school-including 42% of university graduates......43.6% of American adults read below the 7th grade level... they are functionally illiterate... fully 50% of high school graduates cannot read their graduation diplomas, nor fill out an application form for a job at McDonald's..."
"Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?"
"Don't let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it's a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing."
"Reading is a source of liberation. Children who are taught to read early on, are commonly taught to communicate in other significant verbal and nonverbal ways."
"Why is it these days that so many people hate reading? Some people won't even touch a newspaper or magazine. It isn't television that kills reading, or cinema or radio, or even those accursed little things known as video games. People used to read all the time, but when the century shifted subtly, somewhere along the way, people forgot how to imagine. When did it happen? At what point? Who or what is to blame? Maybe it's just because the world has become so cold and scientific and shallow in recent years."
"Words define us,' Mom continued, as I struggled to make my clumsy marks look like her elegant script. 'We must protect our knowledge and pass it on whenever we can. If we are ever to become a society again, we must teach others how to remain human."
"I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man's faculties could be developed, no man's moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books."
"Illiterate people should only be charged for the photographs, when buying a newspaper."
Explore more quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin
"I certainly wasn't happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can't earn, and can't keep, and often don't even recognize at the time; I mean joy."
"None were left now to unname, and yet how close I felt to them when I saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawl across my way or over my skin, or stalk me in the night, or go along beside me for a while in the day. They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another's scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another's blood or flesh, keep one another warm, that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food."
"I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don't have to learn.Vokep shook his head grimly. "It's the kids, he said. "Having babies. Makes 'em propertarians. They won't let go. He sighed. "Touch and go, brother, that's the rule. Don't ever let yourself be owned."
"Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known."
"The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction."
"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
"There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams."
"I think we shall have trouble learning how to lie, having for so long practiced the art of going round and round the truth without ever lying about it, or reaching it either."
bottom of page