Betty Smith Quotes

Reading liberates you. You could know about the world through reading.

Education is freedom.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

I can't imagine I could have become the person I am now without books. Books became synonymous with freedom. They showed that you could open doors and walk through.

As long as I'm reading, I'm at home.

I love working alone. Crave it, in fact. I feel truly alive then.

When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.

Only the educated are free.

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.

Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

I was on my own at Wellesley, surrounded by a lot of young women who were motivated and intellectually curious. I started to read because I was required to do so for class, but I soon found myself enjoying the seclusion of the library. I came to see reading as an important way to learn about people, including myself.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere.

You could not let your masters see you read; but now [after Emancipation] the colored people are fond of sending their children to school. Because the children in after years will be able to tell us ignorant ones how to do for ourselves.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how.

For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

I'm a voracious reader, I'm always studying.

I was always fond of books right since my childhood days. Even as a teenager, books were my company. Not that I did not have friends, but books kept my occupied most of the time.

When you know your self-worth, and you read and you ask questions and you study and you travel, you become free.

I loved to read books in the free world, and there was a lot of time to sit around and do nothing in prison. When you read, it opens up your mind; it helped us take our minds away from where we were.

Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.

You will learn most things by looking, but reading gives understanding. Reading will make you free.

In those first few hours officially single again the world seems like it expands, suddenly bigger and more vast now that you have to get through it alone.

Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.

Being single is about celebrating and appreciating your own space that you're in.