Audre Lorde Quotes

I feel very privileged to have reached so many kids because a life without stories, without the power of books, would be a very grey world, it's good to add colour.

A collection of good books, with a soul to it in the shape of a librarian, becomes a vitalized power among the impulses by which the world goes on to improvement.

I've seen firsthand how books can change people's lives. It happened to me.

Every time a bookseller hands a child a book, they are doing something that is the heart and soul of the American dream and the American ideal. It's a very sacred tradition.

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.

Read in order to live.

Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

Read everything! I believe that reading made me a writer.

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 do believe that books can change lives and give people this kind of language they wouldn't have had otherwise.

I've just always loved books, and I love the idea that we're all just really made of stories. I do also like the idea that anyone can love books. Books don't care how educated you are or what you do for a living.

I encourage a lot of young women to read. I tell them that it will change their lives.

Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?" "The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret

At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better

I think books can give rise to empowerment.

Literacy is much more than an educational priority - it is the ultimate investment in the future and the first step towards all the new forms of literacy required in the twenty-first century. We wish to see a century where every child is able to read and to use this skill to gain autonomy.

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

You can't write if you don't read.

Reading was very important to me as a kid. It was very inspirational to me. I went to a school where that wasn't encouraged so much, but my parents encouraged that, and it has made me part of who I am.

It is important to be well read, at least a little bit.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.