100 Best Quotes About Reading to Children (from Books We Love)

Reading to children is this magical experience that transports you right back into your childhood imagination. It’s beautiful! These quotes about reading to children are reminders that their entire world is just that magical. We only have to snuggle in and open a book to find it.

Our Favorite Quotes About Reading to Children

1. “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” ― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
2. “We read to know we’re not alone.” ― William Nicholson, Shadowlands
3. “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” ― C.S. Lewis
4. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
5. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
6. “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” ― Mark Twain
7. “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” ― Albert Einstein
8. “If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” ― Oscar Wilde
9. “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” ― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
10. “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” ― Groucho Marx
11. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
12. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
13. “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” ― C.S. Lewis
14. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” ― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
15. “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.” ― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron
16. “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” ― C.S. Lewis
17. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” ― Ray Bradbury
18. “May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.” ― Neil Gaiman
19. “Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” ― Gustave Flaubert
20. “Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.” ― C.S. Lewis
21. “Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.” ― Voltaire
22. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” ― St. Augustine
23. “Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read.” ― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess
24. “Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.” ― George Bernard Shaw
25. “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” ― Frederick Douglass
26. “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” ― Fran Lebowitz, The Fran Lebowitz Reader
27. “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” ― Benjamin Franklin
28. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” ― Robert Frost
29. “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” ― Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
30. “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” ― Joseph Brodsky
31. “Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.” ― Christopher Paolini, Eragon
32. “There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.” ― Irwin Shaw
33. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
34. “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” ― Mortimer J. Adler
35. “It’s strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.” ― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
36. “Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.” ― Raymond Carver
37. “I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.” ― Anne Tyler
38. “Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.” ― Diane Duane, So You Want to Be a Wizard
39. “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” ― Orhan Pamuk, The New Life
40. “Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.” ― Mark Twain
41. “I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.” ― J.K. Rowling
42. “A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.” ― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish
43. “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” ― Margaret Fuller
44. “No. I can survive well enough on my own— if given the proper reading material.” ― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass
45. “The world was hers for the reading.” ― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
46. “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” ― Logan Pearsall Smith
47. “I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.” ― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
48. “I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
49. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” ― James Baldwin
50. “All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.” ― Lemony Snicket
51. “She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.” ― Annie Dillard, The Living
52. “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” ― Saul Bellow
53. “It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.” ― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo
54. “My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read.” ― Abraham Lincoln
55. “A good book is an event in my life.” ― Stendhal, The Red and the Black
56. “If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.” ― Francois Mauriac
57. “The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.” ― Katherine Mansfield
58. “It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” ― C.S. Lewis
59. “You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they’ve been read…” ― Keri Hulme, The Bone People
60. “Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you’ve finished just to stay near it.” ― Markus Zusak
61. “A word after a word after a word is power.” ― Margaret Atwood
62. “If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.” ― Audrey Hepburn
63. “Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” ― Joyce Carol Oates
64. “I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson
65. “If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” ― Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82
66. “What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!” ― Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Selected Letters Of Thomas Babington Macaulay
67. “You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.” ― Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
68. “Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers.” ― Steven Spielberg
69. “Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.” ― Louis L’Amour, Matagorda/The First Fast Draw
70. “Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.” ― Stephen Fry
71. “When you read a book, you hold another’s mind in your hands.” ― James Burke
72. “Well-read people are less likely to be evil.” ― Lemony Snicket, The Slippery Slope
73. “However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?” ― Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni
74. “Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.” ― Roberto Bolaño, 2666
75. “A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.” ― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
76. “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.” ― Emily Dickinson
77. “The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.” ― Voltaire
78. “My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.” ― Malcolm X
79. “Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” ― Stéphane Mallarmé
80. “We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.” ― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
81. “Read, read, read. That’s all I can say.” ― Carolyn Keene, The Secret of the Old Clock
82. “Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.” ― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
83. “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.” ― Maya Angelou
84. “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
85. “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” ― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You
86. “I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.” ― Gary Paulsen, Shelf Life: Stories by the Book
87. “Do your bit to save humanity from lapsing back into barbarity by reading all the novels you can.” ― Richard Hughes
88. “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
89. “A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.” ― Walter Mosley, The Long Fall
90. “Surprising what you can dig out of books if you read long enough, isn’t it?” ― Robert Jordan
91. “When I only begin to read, I forget I’m on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.” ― Anzia Yezierska
92. “Reading was a joy, a desperately needed escape — I didn’t read to learn, I was reading to read.” ― Christian Bauman
93. “It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others – even my nearest and dearest – there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.” ― Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
94. “You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!” ― Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who: Season 2, Tooth and Claw Episode
95. “It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.” ― Lemony Snicket
96. “When I am dead, I hope it may be said: “His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.” ― Hilaire Belloc
97. “If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.” ― J.K Rowling
98. “He made me think of all the books I hadn’t read, and all the ones I’d read but hadn’t fully understood.” ― Tom Perrotta, Joe College
99. “In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried … nothing is so warming and companionable.” ― Elizabeth Goudge
100. “The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.” ― Andre Maurois

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