38 Quotes by Jim Trelease

The more you read, the better you get, the more better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.

So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television's potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.

The closest thing we have to a "crap detector" is a qualified librarian.

What happened to the classics?" you may ask. "Don't you believe in reading great literature to children?"Nothing happened to the classics-but something happened to children: their imaginations went to sleep in front of the television set twenty-five years ago. Reading a classic to a child whose imagination is in a state of retarded development will not foster a love of literature in that child.

Readers don’t grow in trees. But they are grown-in places where they are fertilized with lots of print, and above all, read to daily.

Reading aloud is the best advertisement because it works. It allows a child to sample the delights of reading and conditions him to believe that reading is a pleasureful experience, not a painful or boring one.

What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn.

You became a reader because you saw and heard someone you admired enjoying the experience, someone led you to the world of books even before you could read, let you taste the magic of stories, took you to the library, and allowed you to stay up later at night to read in bed.

Each day millions of children arrive in American classrooms in search of more than reading and math skills. They are looking for a light in the darkness of their lives, a Good Samaritan who will stop and bandage a bruised heart or ego.