Maureen Corrigan Quotes & Sayings

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. — Maureen Corrigan

Social class. Class remains our national awkward topic, usually mumbled over in academic diversity workshops; indeed, most people don't know how to talk about class without automatically coupling it with race. That's because we Americans are loath to recognize that the sky's-the-limit potential we take as our birthright comes at a price far beyond what many Americans--of any race--can afford to pay. — Maureen Corrigan

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

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. — 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

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. — Maureen Corrigan

During the Great Depression, the philosophy of grin-and-bear-it became a national coping mechanism. — Maureen Corrigan

By 1929, one out of every five Americans had a car (as opposed to one out of thirty-seven Englishmen, one out of forty Frenchmen, and one out of forty-eight Germans). — Maureen Corrigan

I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off 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. pg. xvi — Maureen Corrigan

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

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

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. — Maureen Corrigan

Luckily, my job demands constant reading, otherwise I'd have to figure out some other excuse. — Maureen Corrigan

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

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

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. — Maureen Corrigan

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. — Maureen Corrigan

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. — 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

Reading good books doesn't necessarily make one a good person - or a smarter, funnier, or more cultivated person, either. — 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 and crucifixes, mute testimony to the limits of literature as a sustaining comfort in life. — 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

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

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. — Maureen Corrigan

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. — 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

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. — 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

There's no such things as travel insurance when it comes to reading. — 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

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

Terry Eagleson says his family's aim was to have the words "We Were No Trouble" engraved on their gravestones. — Maureen Corrigan

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

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

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

Jeffrey Makala, the friendly and astute rare-books and special collections librarian who will be my guide, confirms my opinion that librarians, along with independent-bookstore owners and dedicated middle- and high-school teachers, are the most selfless guardians of literature on earth. — Maureen Corrigan

I miss that world from the safe distance of memory. — Maureen Corrigan

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. — Maureen Corrigan

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. — 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

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

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. — 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

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

A hilarious academic novel that'll send you laughing (albeit ruefully) back into the trenches of the classroom ... [A] mordant minor masterpiece ... Like the best works of farce, academic or otherwise, Dear Committee Members deftly mixes comedy with social criticism and righteous outrage. By the end, you may well find yourself laughing so hard it hurts. — 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 me alone I'm reading — Maureen Corrigan