Mary Ellen Chase Quotes

There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.

As a kid, I used to go to the library and take out all the art books.

As a child, I spent a lot of time at the library.

A love of books has opened so many doors for me. Stories have inspired me and taught me to aspire.

I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.

One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.

Books were the window from which I looked out of a rather meager and decidedly narrow room onto a rich and wonderful universe. I loved the look and feel of books, even the smell... Libraries were treasure houses. I always entered them with a slight thrill of disbelief that all their endless riches were mine for the borrowing.

Reading has been the fuel of my motivation: it has changed the direction in which I have traveled, and it has enhanced my creative imagination more than any other activity I have ever pursued.

The best way to enhance a child's imagination is to make them read.

The most inspiring objects are books. I have about 5,000 volumes in my home library. It's an unending source of visuals and ideas.

I think reading is important for a variety of things. I mean, first of all, it's a way to get information and find out what's going on in the world. But also, it helps your imagination.

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.

Libraries raised me.

Books always help.

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

Reading is as much a part of life as any part, and it's life itself. And it allows us to live other lives that we might not have lived if we hadn't picked up those books.

But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.

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.

I believe a child's most important job is to explore the world around them through play.

If you can get kids excited about reading, maybe that can open up a whole other world for them.

In some ways I grew up in the public library in Troy, Michigan.

It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.