Quotes from Maryanne Wolf

There are, no doubt, as many conceptualizations of the good life as there are lives that aspire to it, but surely one of the most important pathways to its achievement begins with the desire to seek what is good - for the self, for those we love, for 'our neighbor,' for our earth.

We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a 'fresh' brain - one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.

We are not only what we read. We are how we read.

Fluency is the developmental process that connects decoding with everything we know about words to make the meaning of the text come to life. Fluency is a wonderful bridge to comprehension and to a life-long love of reading.

Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips.

I want my thoughts to be an incentive for the reader to give his or her own thoughts. After I wrote 'Proust and the Squid,' I received truly hundreds of letters - I'm still receiving them - and the letters that I wrote back helped me formulate my thinking around things I know are important to others.

The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information.

We need to discern what it is that requires reflection in our lives and in what we read and how we read it.

Inevitably, there will be many aspects of culture that would benefit from a more reflective or contemplative approach to them.

I have always worried about who can read, who can't, who doesn't, and the great, life-altering consequences hidden within those distinctions.

I don't want technology to replace teachers, but where there are no teachers, or the teachers are overwhelmed, it can be helpful.

After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.

After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read.

Reading or written language is a cultural invention that necessitated totally new connections among structures in the human brain underlying language, perception, cognition, and, over time, our emotions.

The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.

The first and most common reason for not being a fluent reader is that the child does not yet know how to decode very well yet. They lack automatic decoding skills, and this prevents them from being able to read accurately, much less smoothly and quickly. Decoding accuracy is the first prerequisite to fluency.

If you word-spot James Joyce, you'll miss the entire experience.

No one can ever prepare a parent for two things: the immeasurable love that comes with having a child; and the sorrow and confusion that comes when your child appears to learn in a different way from other children.

Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new.

The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.

The brain is plastic its whole life span.

The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.

The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.