Maureen Corrigan Quotes

Knocking back the wine and reaching for the cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction

It is probably the sturdy influence of the Catholic belief in a Big Plan that accounts for my own enduring faith that you find the books you need when you need them- even if they're not the books you start out thinking you need.

Like overzealous religious converts, climbers originally from the lower rungs of society tend to go overboard when they ape the upper class.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

I was assigned to the office of a recently deceased faculty member; the office hadn't been cleaned out yet, and a few days before the fall term began, I unlocked the door to find a dirty room whose bookshelves were crammed with empty bourbon bottles and crucifixes, mute testimony to the limits of literature as a sustaining comfort in life.

Flawless ... Tightly choreographed ... Shipstead gains entry into exclusive worlds and trains her opera glasses on private social rituals, as well as behind-the-scenes hanky panky ... Similar to classic ballet, the power of Astonish Me arises out of the pairing of a melodramatic storyline with scrupulously executed range of movement ... Shipstead sweeps you into this insider world of sweat, narcissism, and short-lived magic ... Transcendent.

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

I miss that world from the safe distance of memory.

Given the consumer-pleasing politics of today's universities, I have, in effect, seventy new bosses each semester; they're sitting at the desk in front of me.

What we readers do each time we open a book is to set up on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies.

Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.

Constant reading pulled me away from the world of my childhood, the world of my parents.

Like a lot of other bashful introverts, I discovered that I like teaching a lot because it's like acting. When I stepped into the classroom, I stepped into a role, one that allowed me to forget myself.

One of the many drawbacks of this "I teach what I am" approach is that it stifles classroom discussion. Any disagreement with the professor's expertise comes off as an ad hominem attack.

To read Helen Macdonald's memoir, H Is for Hawk, is to feel as though Emily Bronte just turned up at your door, trailing all the windy, feral outdoors into your living room.

Prolonged travel in the alternate world of books can also make a reader more prone to fantasy thinking and estranged from his or her "real" life.

The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.

As kids, we were taught to be the psychological equivalent of Navy SEALS- an elite parochial-school unit, drilled to take life's blows on the chin without wincing.

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're decoding

Because they were, like me, Irish Catholic, their nuptials were distinguished by mediocre food, free-flowing liquor, pre-Riverdance-style step dancing, and their own peculiar strains of Gaelic piety.

My students should be afraid: choosing what kind of work you'll do to a great extent means choosing who you'll be.

Edmondson has incisively discussed the ways college campuses have grown akin to upscale retirement homes for the very young, where the promise of intellectually demanding courses ranks far below the lure of new gymnastic facilities.

In our daily lives, where we're bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small.

It's Fitzgerald's thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel. Its soaring conclusion tells us that, even though Gatsby dies and the small and corrupt survive, his longing was nonetheless magnificent.

All of the disparate books on my list contain characters, scenes or voices that linger long past the last page of their stories.

Her "green light" was Harvard. "But if I don't get into Harvard, I will not die, right? The journey toward the dream is the most important thing.

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

We read literature for a number of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and - especially important - to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others.

Fitzgerald's plot may suggest that the American Dream is a mirage, but his words make that dream irresistible.

Readers, professional or casual, are alert to passages in a book that illuminate what was previously shadowy and formless.

Reading good books doesn't necessarily make one a good person - or a smarter, funnier, or more cultivated person, either.

My own mother, who's always dazzled by my faculty and answering questions in the literature a category on Jeopardy whenever we watch it together, keeps urging me to try to get on the show to make all those years spent reading finally pay off. Leave me alone I'm reading