32 Quotes by Amanda Ripley

If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said.

Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent.

The health of your family or your office or your city directly affects the health of it after. The better you are at handling high-stress situations with little information, those skills lead to resilience and the ability to recover afterward.

Interestingly, the only class that Eric actually enjoyed in Korea was math. He noticed it on his first day of school. Something was very different about how math was taught in Korea. Something that not even Minnesota had figured out.

Citizens are not prepared for attacks because there is a bias against the public by nearly every expert and government official. In emergency preparedness, there is this belief that public will panic, that the public is not to be trusted, that there will be looting.

Most serious plane crashes are survivable. There’s a sense that, ‘Oh, if we go down, that’s it, it’s out of my hands.’ And that’s just statistically not true. I have more optimism and more faith that my own actions can make a difference.

Why do we procrastinate leaving? The denial phase is a humbling one. It takes a while to come to terms with our miserable luck. Rowley puts it this way: ‘Fires only happen to other people.’ We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before.

In Korea, math moved fluidly. When the teacher asked questions, the kids answered as if math were a language that they knew by heart. As in Tom’s class in Poland, calculators weren’t allowed, so kids had learned mental tricks to manipulate numbers quickly.

Tom was not good at math. He’d started to lose his way in middle school, as so many American kids did. It had happened gradually; first he hadn’t understood one lesson, and then another and another.