If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach.

Putting babies as young as two weeks into child care for the first year of their life, for 60 hours a week, will cause their brains damage.

Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn’t achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who’s reading aloud—it’s the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.

Books don't harm kids; they arm them.

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.

My Mother was a very wild Australian woman. When we were in Africa she could kill a snake with one blow from a crow bar, which she kept at the back door.