We disapprove of parental hovering not because it won’t pay off later—it might; it does!—but because it’s obnoxious now. - Adam Gopnik

We understand instinctively that being a prodigy wasn’t [Wayne Gretzky’s] platform for a lifetime’s achievement; it marked the possibility of a highly specific, highly term-limited kind of performance.

There appear to be as many learning styles among prodigies as there are prodigies to express them.

[M]ath prodigies are set somewhat apart from the more general-capacity prodigies, being seemingly possessed of a weird bit of wiring more than an over-all enhanced capacity for learning to do things.