Heather Cass White

“The mind freed to wander in books is never again free of the consequences of that wandering. The mind so freed becomes largely constituted by that wandering, and capable as a result of breathtaking defiances of time, circumstance, and probability.”
― Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life

“Literacy is a human right, an individual competence inextricable from social health. Access to it is a question of social justice, a nonnegotiable entitlement of citizenship. To say...that not everyone has to be a reader is different from saying that not everyone should be taught to read. Everyone has a fundamental right to learn to read. A society in which people are actively denied literacy, or a society that neglects literacy in wide segments of its population, has reason to be ashamed. If the ascendance of the written word may be imagined as a fall from the original paradise of oral culture, the labor with which we are tasked for that primal transgression is making the world of writing available to all comers. It is an enormous labor, requiring unflagging, communal commitment.”
― Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life