Allen Stein

“Comprehension processes [for young readers] grow.... [when] they leave the surface layers of text to explore the wondrous terrain that lies beneath it.

The reading expert Richard Vacca describes this shift as a development from "fluent decoders" to "strategic readers"--"readers who know how to activate prior knowledge before, during and after reading, to decide what's important in a text"....”
― Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

“So much of a child’s life is lived for others. . . . All the reading I did as a child, behind closed doors, sitting on the bed while the darkness fell around me, was an act of reclamation. This and only this I did for myself. This was the way to make my life my own.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

“inflexible muteness of written words doomed the dialogic process Socrates saw as the heart of education.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

“Egyptian and some other early systems were written in the boustrophedon style (Greek for “the turning around of the ox”) in which one line moves from left to right and then right to left, the way oxen plow a field. Instead of scanning in one linear direction as we do today, the eye just moves down a notch at the end of a line and continues to read in the other direction. Egyptians also wrote from top to bottom or vice versa, depending on the architecture of the structure they were inscribing.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain