Daniel Pennac Quotes

If you`re wondering how you`ll find time, it means you don`t really want to read. Because nobody`s ever got time. Children certainly haven`t, nor have teenagers or grown-ups. Life always gets in the way. <...>
Time to read is always time stolen. <...>
Stolen from what?
From the tyranny of living."- p.125

Forced to think you end up coming to a conclusion.Forced to come to a conclusion you make a decision.And once you made the decision you really acts.

I master my doubts now. I have fun with them, they're my travelling companions.

All it takes is one teacher - just one - to save us from ourselves and make us forget all the others.

What we need to understand is that books weren't written so that young people could write essays about them, but so that they could read them if they really wanted to.
Knowledge, academic track record, career, and social life are one thing. Our intimacy and cultural awareness as readers are quite another.

We keep quiet about what we read. Our enjoyment of a book remains a jealously guarded secret. Perhaps because there`s no need to talk, or because it takes time to distill what we've read before we can say anything. Silence is our guarantee of intimacy. We might have finished reading but we`re still living
the book.

I've never had time to read. But no one ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.

We see that that ritual of reading every evening at the end of the bed when they were so little
set time, set gestures
was like a prayer.

A child has no great wish to perfect himself in the use of an instrument of torture, but make it a means to his pleasure, and soon you will not be able to keep him from it.

You can't make someone read. Just like you can't make them fall in love, or dream ...

Once a book falls into our possession, it is ours, the same way children lay their claim: 'That's my book.' As if it were organically part of them. That must be why we have so much trouble returning borrowed books. It's not exactly theft (of course not, we're not thieves, what are you implying?); it's simply a slippage in ownership or, better still, a transfer of substance. That which belonged to someone else becomes mine when I look at it. And if I like what I read, naturally I'll have difficulty giving it back.

Each country thinks its school is in a specific crisis, without ever linking the school's crisis to that of the society around it.

He was an echo chamber for all books, the physical incarnation of words, the book made human.

Reading is an act of resistance. Against what? Against all constraints.

Rather than allowing a book's intelligence to speak through our mouths, we replace it with our own intelligence as we talk about it. Rather than acting as emissary for the book, we become guardians of the temple, boasting of its wonders in the very words that slam shut it's doors: Reading matters! Reading matters!

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything's handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven't understood what the director's on about ... The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you're reading.

Time spent reading, like time spent loving, increases our lifetime.

I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.