I believe language can heal, motivate, inspire and influence. I incorporate quotes in all of my assignment material, offering students an extensive catalog to tap into behavior and attitude toward composition and reading. Quotes offer a kind of writing wellness. Here are a few quotes from my English 0482 Approaches to College Reading II online course:
“Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library. I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge…..(With) my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.”
– Malcolm X
“Books are to be called for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay-the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or framework. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-trained, intuitive…”
– Walt Whitman
“One significant activity that distinguishes high achievers from their less successful counterparts is their love of reading-and their corresponding lack of interest in television.”
– George Gallup, Jr., and Alec M. Gallup
“Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally as sort of ecstasy. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequaled by any other form of communications.”
– Elwyn Brooks White
“The great gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”
-Elizabeth Hardwick
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