Quotes by Maureen Corrigan

About Maureen Corrigan:

Maureen Corrigan is an American journalist, author and literary critic. She writes for the "Book World" section of The Washington Post, and is a book critic on the NPR radio program Fresh Air. In 2005, she published a literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Maureen Corrigan

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 ...

Maureen Corrigan

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.

Maureen Corrigan

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

Maureen Corrigan

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.

Maureen Corrigan

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

Maureen Corrigan

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.

Maureen Corrigan

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

Maureen Corrigan

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.

Maureen Corrigan

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.

Maureen Corrigan

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.

Maureen Corrigan

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.

Maureen Corrigan

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

Maureen Corrigan

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...

Maureen Corrigan

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

Maureen Corrigan

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

Maureen Corrigan

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

Maureen Corrigan

I miss that world from the safe distance of memory.

Maureen Corrigan

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, ...

Maureen Corrigan

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

Maureen Corrigan

Author Bio

  • NameMaureen Corrigan
  • DescriptionAmerican journalist and writer
  • CountryUnited States Of America