"I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can’t read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance."
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Book quotes (page 103 of 1049)
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"In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article."
"I have a book of buildings from 25,000 BC. These are huts built out of mammoth bones. These buildings were beautifully made, from the bones of the body into shelter."
"Chapter books are often written in series and kids have come to expect that they'll come out once a year, so publishers want to keep the momentum going. It's the kind of art I love to make, except that the time frame is really nutty."
"I think that an author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children."
"We cannot learn men from books."
"Some will read only old books, as if there were no valuable truths to be discovered in modern publications: others will only read new books, as if some valuable truths are not among the old. Some will not read a book because they know the author: others . . . would also read the man."
"We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable."
"Scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself."
"Read much, but not too many books."
"You'll see all other mortal sinners, the ones who flout the honor owed to gods or guests, or loving parents--you'll see them get the justice they deserve. For Hades holds men mightily to a strict accounting down below the earth; he sees all things, inscribes them within the book of his remembering."
"I can easily do without people (there are days when I could easily do without myself), and ... in the country of books where I dwell, the dead can count entirely as much as the living."
"For as to the dispersing of Books, that Circumstance does perhaps as much harm as good: Since Nonsense flies with greater Celerity, and makes greater Impression than Reason; though indeed no particular species of Nonsense is so durable. But the several Forms of Nonsense never cease succeeding one another; and Men are always under the Dominion of some one or other, though nothing was ever equal in Absurdity and Wickedness to our present Patriotism."
"I have always read all the latest cookery books and magazines, from all over the world"
"I was supposed to go to drama school and then go to New York and do theatre. But I grew up on all those fabulous movies and had read all the bold Hollywood books, and I thought I just had to take a look."
"Whenever I see an autobiography for sale in the book store i just flip to the about the author section. I'm like, "Done, next!""
"People can take your name and write a book about you and they make money off of it. How is the public supposed to know you're not authorizing that book? As soon as you make a big stink about it it only makes the book sell more."
"Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words."
"Although I enjoy digging through the library to help students find books, my aim is to help them develop self-confidence in choosing books for themselves."
"What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist."