Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books Quotes

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

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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 ...

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

It's a gift of tranquility when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don't quite know why mine didn't, although I think books, again, are partly to blame.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

Those straight-spined parishioners could justify their exhibitionism by telling themselves that they were setting an example, even educating the rest of us.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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 m...

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

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

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books

I miss that world from the safe distance of memory.

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books