Sheila MacKenzie

“When she stamped her foot, it made a strange thud on the desolate beach. Like a heartbeat.”
― David Adams Richards, The Bay of Love and Sorrows

“Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

“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

“The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.”
― Daniel Defoe