Quotes about Reading for Students to Ponder and Paraphrase

A metaphor is like a suitcase

The Value of Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing is one of the most important skills we can teach junior high and high school students. Often they want to rush into interpreting and reacting to a text even before they know what it means. We teachers sometimes suffer from the delusion that since a student can read the words on the page, he or she understands what’s been read. But that’s not always true.

Take this quote by H.L. Wayland, for instance: “Universal suffrage without universal education would be a curse.” Each year I ask my eighth graders to paraphrase it, and inevitably four or five students confuse the word suffrage with suffering and write about how education is necessary to end pain in the world. The students thought they understood the idea, but they ended up misinterpreting it. Paraphrasing helps students to unpack complex, pithy ideas, and it compels them to grapple with defining words that we assume we understand.  For instance, in he Wayland quote above, students need to explain the word education.  What is education?  Education, like the words freedom, love and justice, is not easy to define, though we use the term all the time.  Paraphrasing requires that students “unpack” these kinds of words.

The Suitcase Metaphor

I like to tell my students that paraphrasing is like unpacking a suitcase. I don’t remember where I first heard the metaphor, but it goes like this: A thoughtful, profound quote is like a packed suitcase. The important ideas contained within the quote are like clothes that have been folded and pressed so that they’re easier to take with you. A quote is easy to remember, just as a suitcase is easy to carry. But you can’t wear clothes that are packed in a suitcase. You have to unpack the suitcase in order to use them. In the same way, you need to unpack the words and ideas in a profound quote before you can understand them.

Conclusion

You might try giving your students quotes to paraphrase this year. I think you’ll be surprised by how difficult it is for them, and how often they misinterpret what they read. Each year my students tell me how hard it was to paraphrase, but how much it helped them to improve as readers.

There are thousands of profound quotes for students to paraphrase; here are a few that deal with the value of books and reading:

“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.” – Henry David Thoreau

“The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity.” – Thomas Carlyle

“To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.” – Edmund Burke

“He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.” – Roland Barthes

“Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” – Francis Bacon

“Let me roughly divide books into those which compete with the movies and those with which the movies cannot compete. They are the books that can elevate or instruct. If they are fine works of fiction, they can deepen your appreciation of human life. If they are serious works of nonfiction, they can inform or enlighten you.” – Mortimer Adler

“Everything we read stimulates our mind to think, and what we think determines what we desire, and desires are the seedbed of our actions. Given this iron law of human nature–from reading to thinking, to desiring, to acting–we are shaping our destiny by the ideas we choose to have enter our minds through print.” – Fr. John Hardon, S.J.

“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” Clifton Fadiman

“The adventurous student will always study the classics…For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man. They are the only oracles which are not decayed.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Books must be read as reservedly and deliberately as they were written.” – Henry David Thoreau

“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; — not represented on canvas or marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.” – Clifton Fadiman

“The great majority of the several million books that have been written in the Western tradition alone—more that 99 percent of them—will not make sufficient demands on you for you to improve your skill in reading.” – Mortimer Adler

“It’s not how many books you get through, it’s how many books get through you.” – Mortimer J. Adler

“Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which others have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.” – Jesse Lee Bennett