25+ Best Quotes about Reading Aloud

Do you remember the first book you loved having read aloud to you? The one you could listen to a thousand times and just couldn’t get enough of? Or the first book you read by yourself? It probably brings to mind memories of that time in your life.

Maybe good memories of whoever read the book to you. Or the way stories took you away to other worlds. Though reading aloud has numerous academic benefits, the way it speaks to our souls is what carries us throughout our whole lives. They carry out through our children’s lives as well.

Even just 10 minutes a day of reading aloud will give your children over 60 hours a year of hearing a story, snuggling with you on a couch, and having the courage of the hero. Don’t let that be the only thing that encourages you to read aloud. Check out the 25+ quotes below.

• Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself. –George Bernard Shaw
• Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read. — Marilyn Jager Adams
• Reading should not be presented to children as a chore, a duty. It should be offered as a gift. –Kate DiCamillo
• 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
• Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist. Children already know dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children dragons can be beaten. – G.K. Chesterton, paraphrase from Tremendous Trifles

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• A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest. — C.S. Lewis
• Children are made readers on the laps of their parents. — Emilie Buchwald
• When I say to a parent, “read to a child”, I don’t want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate. — Mem Fox
• You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child. — Dr. Seuss
• When we read aloud, we give our kids practice living as heroes. Practice dealing with life-and-death situations, practice living with virtue, practice failing at virtue. As the characters in our favorite books struggle through hardship, we struggle with them. We consider whether we would be as brave, as bold, as fully human as our favorite heroes. And then we grasp—on a deeper, more meaningful level—the story we are living ourselves as well as the kind of character we will become as that story unfolds. – Sarah Mackenzie, The Read-Aloud Family

• Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. – Mason Cooley
• 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
• It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading.— Katherine Paterson
• When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you’ll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone’s arms, as a story was spun around you like a web. — Jodi Picoult
• Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. — C.S. Lewis

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• All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen. — Roald Dahl, Matilda
• Almost as big of a mistake as not reading to children at all is stopping too soon. — Jim Trelease, The Read-Aloud Handbook
• Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. — Neil Gaiman
• Children read more when they see other people reading, both at school and at home. –Stephen D. Krashen, The Power of Reading
• There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island. — Walt Disney
• Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere. — Mary Schmich

• There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.
  — Jacqueline Kennedy
• There are few stronger family bonds than this habit of devoting an occasional hour to reading aloud, on winter evenings, at any rate. The practice is pleasant at the time, and pleasant in the retrospect, it gives occasion for much bright talk, merry and wise, and quickens family affection by means of intellectual sympathy. Indeed, the wonder is that any family should neglect such a simple means of pure enjoyment, and of moral, as well as intellectual culture. — Charlotte Mason, Formation of Character
• Reading … a vacation for the mind. — Dave Barry
• Being read to as a child is one of the great experiences in life. — Billy Collins
• You may have tangible wealth untold. Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be — I had a mother who read to me. — Strickland Gillilan
• Wherever I am, if I’ve got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy. — J.K. Rowling