In Danny DeVito's film "Matilda," Harry Wormwood berates his young daughter, the title character, when she insists on reading. He tells her, "There's nothing you can get from a book that you can't get faster from television." Matilda's would-be visionary father, however, is blind to crucial habits of mind fostered by reading books that are not acquired from watching television, video, or film. In this essay, the author sketches a few of the virtues cultivated by reading novels which are not developed as well, if at all, by the experience of visual story-telling. He asserts that the virtues developed by reading novels include an appreciation of pause and language; the habit of maintaining abiding awareness; and enhanced capacities for funding and inwardness. These virtues weave in and out of each other. Appreciation of pause contributes to a sense of one's inner life and a readiness to explore it. Abiding awareness enables literary funding of everyday life, as well as the funding of fictions from that daily living. Appreciation of language is a reason to pause and also stimulates linguistic funding. (Contains 20 notes.)