Reading good fiction is not simply a frivolous activity for those who aren’t serious about life. I read because I am serious, and find that fiction says true things I might never hear any other way.
— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 33
Good books instruct me about the world. I learn information; I gain perspective. I get a handle on history or people who have influenced the world. I have more breadth in my thinking — not a clinical detachment, but an involvement of myself so that it translates into my life.
I travel to places I might never visit in any other way except in a book. I solve problems in my life by sharing in the lives of others. I grow spiritually by encountering the wisdom of people who have thought through issues that still cause me to struggle. I share in the adventures of others and widen my own experiences.
— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 26-27
The sheer luxury of reading and reveling in the world I live in is something I treasure. Life is more than meat and potatoes and duties. Learning to see, to laugh, and to enjoy encounters with others is reason enough to read. The world has comedy built into it; the ridiculous is but to be explored. Every reader knows the pleasure of being transported to another world in books.
— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 26
Reading enlarges my vision of the world; it helps me understand someone who is different from me. It makes me bigger on the inside. We tend to see the world from our own perspective; it is good to see it from the eyes of others. Good literature helps me understand who I am in relation to what others experience. Far from being an escape from reality, good literature is a window into reality.
— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 24-25
Good literature is words at their best, taking words out of the mundane and demonstrating their wonder. It’s all of a piece, this business of words and reading.
— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 24
Book readers can go places without phoning a travel agent or starting the car. You can meet fascinating people in your own living room, people you would never know any other way. New ideas and concepts roll out of the pages of books into your own life, not because you have enrolled in school, but because you are reading. You can go on adventures you would never dare plan. Add to this the depth of feeling and beauty that comes from the right words in the right places — aah, who wouldn’t want to be a reader! Reading enables us to see the world as richly colored rather than black and white.
— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 14
Though it was not part of a lesson plan, it imparted a truth that left me spellbound. Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers. From the beginning, I’ve searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible yearnings, and their most soul-killing doubts. I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through a complicated life of books that try to teach me how to die.
— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life, p. 10-11
I am here to posit that it’s exactly in these moments of struggle and stress that we need books the most. There’s something in the pause to read that’s soothing in and of itself. A moment with a book is basic self-care, the kind of skill you pass along to your children as you would a security blanket or a churchgoing habit. It’s a pair of glasses you let sit on your nose for a few stolen hours, coloring your familiar living room and the blustery world outside with the lens of another woman’s experience. It’s a familiar book, rediscovered and dusted off, cracked open at random until you’re sucked in again. It reads differently at different junctures in your life, but that’s part of the fun. Time travel, redemption, escape, and self-knowledge are all neatly bound and sewn into the modest covers of the books we pass from hand to hand, library to purse, mother to daughter, where heroines’ lessons live long after they’ve gone out of print or disintegrated from love and wear.
— Erin Blakemore, The Heroine’s Bookshelf: Life Lessons from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder, p. xv
If literature aids in furthering human knowledge and understanding, then encouraging children to read is one of the building blocks of our civilization.
— Elizabeth Bird, Children’s Literature Gems, p.9
Why do kids read? They read because they are made to, of course, but they also read — via media in a multitude of forms — because they want to find something out, or they want to join their imagination with somebody else’s. I will say it again: They read for the same reasons adults do.
— Roger Sutton, A Family of Readers, p. xviii