Allen Stein

“There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain's astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. Underlying the brain's ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. [...] we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs.”
― 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

“Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain