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.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.

The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading.

The fastest way to teach a child to read is to teach them to write.

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.

Books don't harm kids; they arm them.

You're not lonely when you're teaching, you're not quiet, you're laughing most of the time, you're having a wonderful time interacting with young people. It's the best fun in the world.

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.

Babies have much higher levels of stress in childcare.

As everyone knows, nothing is sweeter than tiny baby fingers and chubby baby toes.

I don't go to church much anymore, but Methodist values still wind me up and send me ticking into my daily life.

You have to do what your heart dictates, " Vivian says. "Do you believe that?""Not sure, actually. It's always annoyingly inconvenient, isn't it, the thing about the heart?

If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.

I've always had a 'Work hard, play hard' attitude to life - I still do - but sometimes you get involved in something that needs a calm, methodical approach.

You know how many movies it took Tom Cruise before he was making 5, 6 million dollars? It probably took a billion dollars in box office.

I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map and there is no road. It is one of a kind just as yours is.

The determination that led me to create a new sports team taught me an important lesson: opportunity is manufactured.

It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

It's not about winning or losing a competition, it's about beating the doubt from within yourself and knowing at the end of each day you are one step closer to your goals.

A long-term romance is like a rose bush. In any given season, a blossom might fall off. But if the plant is well nourished, then the season will come around again, and new blossoms appear.

The more I help others to succeed, the more I succeed.