Maryanne Wolf Quotes

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

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.

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.

The manner in which I learned to read and write, not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease, so much so, that I have no recollection whatever of learning the alphabet

If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.

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

In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.

Reading taught me how to write.

It is my desire to break the destructive generational cycle of illiteracy in the home by focusing on the children. Reading to your child has so much value as a parent because it opens the lines of communication.

You have to be literate in today's world. We're not going to get away with not teaching boys to read.

Reading and writing is so important, and it's something I am really keen to promote. It's something that can be a bit lost these days with so much else going on.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

There's definitely a value in being literate.

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

All the youth ..., who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it be set to learn ... until they are able to read English writing well.

Illiteracy must be banished from the land.

I often pick up papers and books which have all kinds of pictures and marks in them, but I cannot understand them as a white person does. They have a way of communicating by the use of written symbols and figures; but before they could do that, they had to have an understanding among themselves. You are learning that, and I was very much pleased to hear you are reading.

Comics have always helped people to read. A lot of people learned to read by reading the comics. And it's our livelihood, after all. If people don't know how to read, they're not reading our comics.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

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 think literacy is everything.

Those who do not read have no advantage over those who cannot read.

Illiterates have to dictate.

Being able to read, write, do your sums really transforms a human being.