Jodi Picoult Quotes

Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult, I've decided, is only a slow sewing shut.

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.

If you just casually look at a baby, it doesn't look like there's very much going on there, but they know more and learn more than we would ever have thought. Every single minute is incredibly full of thought and novelty. It's easy as adults to take for granted everything it took to arrive at the state where we are.

I think that children are very smart.

What adolescence is about is by trial and error, honing a frontal cortex that is going to be more optimal by the time you're 25.

By removing the obstacles that have built up over time, you can grow your brain from baseline to super brain.

Children use the fist until they are of age to use the brain.

A university shouldn't be a place of comfort. It should be a place of discomfort because you want to disabuse these kids of whatever prejudices or preconceptions they have when they come. You're trying to get them to think and develop, not be a Johnny-one-note.

When you're a kid, you think you can jump out the window and be okay. But when you get older, you think, "Wait a minute - I can't fly!"

This is the great thing about writing for kids. Adults might not do anything if they recognized me. But if they do see me, and they're with a kid, they'll tell the kid who I am. They think they should give that to the kid. So generally that sends the kid over.

I think the growth of the brain is a slow process. But you do change and the more you accept change and embrace change, the better.

We owe it to our kids to inform them and train them how to think, not what to think.

Language was such a profoundly new evolutionary innovation that our brains had to be completely redesigned in order to handle it.

Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed.

We need kids to remind us of how incredible this world is. People are increasingly losing their childhoods too soon, and that's a danger. There's a prophesy somewhere that at a certain point in history, children will be gray. It's weird to think about, but it's possible.

I think somewhere around high school, your brain starts to gel, to harden. Before that, there’s this time where anything is possible and the more things that you artistically and educationally have in your repertoire, the more you become a child of larger possibilities.

One of the best investments we can make is to give our kids the ingredients they need to develop in the first five years of life.

I cannot for the life of me understand why small children take so long to grow up. I think they do it deliberately, just to annoy me.

It requires a strong mind to bear up against several languages. Some persons have learnt so many, that they have ceased to think in any one.

Some people study a text very deeply. The people are my text. I study their words and what their words sound like, over and over again. When I was a kid, my grandfather said that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you." Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country. It doesn't matter how educated they are. By living in the world and living their experiences, they bring extraordinary truths. I try to do those truths justice.

In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.

Every time you see kid and hear kid, you think, man, I have to not sound like a kid.

It's like you said the other day," said Adam. "You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion.

...long before the child learns to talk properly-and long before it learns to think philosophically-the world will have become a habit. A pity, if you ask me.