Andrea Barrett Quotes

My mother insisted that her children read.

Of course, I've always read. I started when I was four years old and just didn't stop. I read all the time.

I never stopped reading.

Reading is becoming a kind of specialist activity, and that strikes terror into the heart of people who love reading.

If a big person invests time in reading, kids learn reading is important, the child is important, words are important, stories are important.

I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.

I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.

I read a whole lot as a child, and, of course, I still read children's books.

I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.

I'm a known reader. That's what I do with my time.

The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.

I was always a big reader, mostly because my parents were.

I grew up listening to my father argue politics into the night and taking trips every Saturday to the Hood River library where my mother maintained her interest in reading and encouraged the same from her sons.

With reading, I was very lucky. I had a mother who read to me, not because she had time - she was a busy woman - but she found 10 minutes to come and sit on my bed with a book.

I write about kids growing up, I write a lot about schools and parents, and all of my experiences with those things have been suburban experiences.

The fact is that our kids aren't reading books - or frankly, much of anything lately. Schools are under funded, some schools even closing their libraries. Parents have to realize that it's their job, and not the school's job, to get kids into the habit of reading for fun.

As kids do, they're smart, and even if parents try to keep things away from them, conflict and issues and whatnot, kids pick up on what's happening.

It distresses me that parents insist that their children read or make them read. The best way for children to treasure reading is to see the adults in their lives reading for their own pleasure.

Children find prescriptive reading lists daunting, and they are a dangerous thing to have in schools.

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

My mom was a ventriloquist and she always was throwing her voice. For ten years I thought the dog was telling me to kill my father.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.