Top 35 Jim Trelease Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The more you read, the better you get, the more better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.”

— Jim Trelease

2. “Readers don’t grow in trees. But they are grown-in places where they are fertilized with lots of print, and above all, read to daily.”

— Jim Trelease

3. “Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.”

— Jim Trelease

4. “The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”

— Jim Trelease

5. “Each day millions of children arrive in American classrooms in search of more than reading and math skills. They are looking for a light in the darkness of their lives, a Good Samaritan who will stop and bandage a bruised heart or ego.”

— Jim Trelease

6. “If you don’t read much, you really don’t know much. You’re dangerous.”

— Jim Trelease

7. “Reading aloud is the best advertisement because it works. It allows a child to sample the delights of reading and conditions him to believe that reading is a pleasureful experience, not a painful or boring one.”

— Jim Trelease

8. “You became a reader because you saw and heard someone you admired enjoying the experience, someone led you to the world of books even before you could read, let you taste the magic of stories, took you to the library, and allowed you to stay up later at night to read in bed.”

— Jim Trelease

9. “What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we make them learn.”

— Jim Trelease

10. “The eventual strength of our vocabulary is determined not by the ten thousand common words but by how many rare words we understand.”

— Jim Trelease

11. “Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying. For the impoverished child lacking the travel portfolio of affluence, the best way to accumulate background knowledge is by either reading or being read to.”

— Jim Trelease

12. “Vocabulary and coherent sentences can’t be downloaded onto paper unless they’ve first been uploaded to the head – by reading.”

— Jim Trelease

13. “Story is the vehicle we use to make sense of our lives in a world that often defies logic.”

— Jim Trelease

14. “Every time we read to a child, we’re sending a ‘pleasure’ message to the child’s brain. You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure.”

— Jim Trelease

15. “Neither books nor people have Velcro Sides – there must be a bonding agent – someone who attaches child to book.”

— Jim Trelease

16. “What we learn in childhood is carved in stone. What we learn as adults is carved in ice.”

— Jim Trelease

17. “Allow children to choose the books they wish to read to themselves, even if they don’t meet your high standards.”

— Jim Trelease

18. “Like Scout and her father in To Kill a Mockingbird, my father would pull me onto his lap each night in our four-room apartment and read aloud.”

— Jim Trelease

19. “Skill sheets, workbooks, basal reader, flash cards are not enough. To convey meaning you need someone sharing the meaning and flavor of real stories with the student.”

— Jim Trelease

20. “In a similar experiment involving reading to fetuses during the two and a half months before birth, DeCasper found the child’s heartbeat increased with a new story and decreased with a familiar one.”

— Jim Trelease

21. “When the daily number of words for each group of children is projected across four years, the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the working-class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million.”

— Jim Trelease

22. “Amid the push to excellence, with its measurement and accountability, it is easy to lose sight of a key ingredient in reading a book – the pleasure it bring us, something too many boil down to a dirty word: FUN.”

— Jim Trelease

23. “Background knowledge is one reason children who read the most bring the largest amount of information to the learning table and thus understand more of what the teacher or the textbook is teaching. Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying.”

— Jim Trelease

24. “The prime purpose of being four is to enjoy being four – of secondary importance is to prepare for being five.”

— Jim Trelease

25. “The closest thing we have to a “crap detector” is a qualified librarian.”

— Jim Trelease

26. “Follow the suggestion of Dr. Caroline Bauer and post a reminder sign by your door: “Don’t Forget Your Flood Book.” Analogous to emergency rations in case of natural disasters, “flood” books should be taken along in the car or even stored like spares in the trunk. A few chapters from these books can be squeezed into traffic jams on the way to the beach or long waits at the doctor’s office.”

— Jim Trelease

27. “You need the combination of know-how and motivation.”

— Jim Trelease

28. “So how do we educate the heart? There are really only two ways: life experience and stories about life experience, which is called literature. Great preachers and teachers – Aesop, Socrates, Confucius, Moses, and Jesus – have traditionally used stories to get their lesson plans across, educating both the mind and the heart.”

— Jim Trelease

29. “The last thing you want first-graders thinking is that what they’re reading in first grade is as good as books are going to get!”

— Jim Trelease

30. “If there were a national time shortage, the malls would be empty, Netflix would be defunct, and the cable-TV companies would be bankrupt.”

— Jim Trelease

31. “More than nonfiction, fiction forces us to concentrate in order to find meaning, and therefore deepens our engagement and helps comprehension.”

— Jim Trelease

32. “What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.”

— Jim Trelease

33. “There should be no rush to have a child reading before age six or seven. That’s developmentally the natural time.”

— Jim Trelease

34. “We have instant pudding, instant photos, instant coffee – but there are no instant adults.”

— Jim Trelease

35. “So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television’s potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.”

— Jim Trelease

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