Maureen Corrigan Quotes

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

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

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

~ Maureen Corrigan

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

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

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

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

~ 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