Maureen Corrigan Quotes
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.
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.
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.
Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.
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.
According to a Wall Street Journal article some 59 percent of Americans don t own a single book. Not a cookbook or even the Bible.
Reality TV, blogging and self-publishing are all evidence of a society's or culture's desire to be more public. And that's a sign of a healthy or energetic culture.
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.
All of the disparate books on my list contain characters, scenes or voices that linger long past the last page of their stories.
Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.
My students should be afraid: choosing what kind of work you'll do to a great extent means choosing who you'll be.
I miss that world from the safe distance of memory.
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.
Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.
Those straight-spined parishioners could justify their exhibitionism by telling themselves that they were setting an example, even educating the rest of us.
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.
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.
Luckily, my job demands constant reading, otherwise I'd have to figure out some other excuse.
The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.
I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.
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