The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena.
Walter Dean MyersRead
We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading is essential for children's development and should be prioritized as a necessity.
The quote emphasizes the critical importance of reading for children, equating the absence of reading in their lives to a form of neglect. Walter Dean Myers argues that just as a doctor insists on necessary medication for a sick patient, society should insist that children read, framing it as a vital part of their growth and learning that cannot be treated as optional.
Themes
ReadingEducationChildrenImportanceLife
In practice
Example use cases
During a school assembly focused on literacy, this quote could be shared to inspire parents and students.
More from Walter Dean Myers
All quotes →I remember one time being told I could not play in a basketball game at the College of William and Mary because I was black, even though I was playing with a United States Army team.
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As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.
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We need to tell young people that America was built by men and women of all colors and that the future of this country is dependent on the participation of all of our citizens.
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Yeah, that's funny, huh?...Something hurts you real bad and you get used to it. Like being hurt becomes part of who you are.
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Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?
Walter Dean MyersRead
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to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing
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Sadly, there are many children who have not yet been given the chance to 'discover the magic of reading, or set foot in the worlds you can discover on bookshelves.
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An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth.
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A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.
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I am terminally sentimental about graduations. They are more individual than weddings, more conscious than christenings, or bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs. They are almost as much a step into the unknown as funerals-though I assure you, there is life after graduation.
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What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone
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