Adrienne’s Favorite Quotes:

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its' original dimensions – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The reader writes the story. – Annie Proulx

The words on the page are only half the story. The rest is what you bring to the party – Toni Morrison

If you are teaching and not learning, you are not teaching – Frank McCourt

Any book you pick up, if it's good, is a printed circuit for your life to flow through – so when you read a book, you are engaged in the events of the mind of the writer. Your are bringing your own creative faculties into sync. You’re imagining the words, the sounds of the words, and you are thinking of the various characters in terms of people you’ve known – not in terms of the writer’s experience, but your own. – E.L. Doctorow

No matter how important code is, it is not the point of reading – David Pearson

Once thought of as a natural result of decoding plus oral language, compehension is now viewed as a much more complex process involving knowledge, experience, thinking, and teaching. - David Pearson

Comprehension occurs during the act of reading – David Pearson

If we continue to teach students new comprehension strategies with texts that are at the edge of their competence, we risk the danger of burdening their learning rather than enhancing it. – Richard Allington

One of reading's biggest myths is that we learn to read in the primary grades, then read to learn in the intermediate grades. Reading is not so simple a process. We develop reading strategies to improve reading proficiency well into adulthood – Stephanie Harvey

The good news is that comprehension has become a long overdue reading focus. The bad news is that comprehension strategies and exercises in isolation often dominate comprehension instruction. Students are spending massive amounts of time learning and practicing these strategies, often without knowing how to apply them or not understand how they fit into the big picture of reading. - Regie Routman

For the price of a bowl of soup, I bought today at an old bookshop a volume to me infinitely valuable; a boon, a prize, a priceless possession. All the way home on the train I read it, I was enlarged, I acquired merit, I added to my life. - David Grayson.

Great books are central to teaching comprehension – Stephanie Harvey

I argue with myself, you're telling stories and you're supposed to be teaching. I am teaching. Storytelling IS teaching. - Frank McCourt


Conversation is a basis for critical thinking. It is the thread that ties together cognitive strategies and provides students with the practice that becomes the foundation for reading, writing and thinking. - Ann Ketch (The Reading Teacher, 59:1)

Through language, your students learn how to become strategic thinkers, not merely strategy users. - Peter Johnston

No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river. - Mitch Albom

We live permanently in the reoccurrence of our own stories. - Michael Ondaatje

If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers, who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can't be in books. The book needs you. - Gary Paulson

The answers aren't important really. What's important is knowing all the questions.

- Z.K. Snyder

No one questions, wonders, no one examines like children. It is not simply that children love questions, but that they live questions. - Christopher Phillips

When your read is full of pictures, they just have to come out. - Bill Maynard

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers – Logan Pearsall Smith

A good book reaches deep inside and shakes the heart awake – Jean Little

In order to construct any kind of meaning in our literacy learning and our life learning, we must find ways to cull and prune the details with which we are bombarded. We must reorganize and create our own explanations for what we are learning, our own definitions of our lives at any particular juncture.

- Eline Keene & Susan Zimmerman (Mosaic of Thought)