76 Quotes by Maryanne Wolf

There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the “friends” who inhabit them.

When we pass over into how a knight thinks, how a heroine behaves, and how an evildoer can regret or deny wrongdoing, we never come back quite the same; sometimes we’re inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched. Through this exposure we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts – that we are individuals, but not alone.

The psychologist Howard Gardner used the MIT scholar Seymour Papert’s famous description of the child’s “grasshopper mind”6 to describe the spasmodic way our digital young now typically “hop from point to point, distracted from the original task.

I still bought many books, but more and more I read in them, rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.

Put in more sobering terms, only one-third of twenty-first-century American children now read with sufficient understanding and speed at the exact age when their future learning depends on it. The fourth grade represents a Maginot Line between learning to read and learning to use reading to think and learn. More disturbing altogether, close to half.

The Bureaus of Prisons in states across America know this well; many of them project the number of prison beds they will need in the future based on third- or fourth-grade reading statistics.

Wisdom, I conclude, is not contemplation alone, 28 not action alone, but contemplation in action. – John Dunne.

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.

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