Quotes from Maureen Corrigan

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

he's a dead man the minute he falls for Daisy the siren. Gatsby "run[s] faster, stretch[es] out [his] arms farther," until, propelled by all that yearning, he leans too far out toward Daisy's dock, falls into the Sound, and drowns.

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.

As socially insecure people tend to do, he responds by apologizing.

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.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that there always comes a moment when I'm in the company of others -- even my nearest and dearest -- when I'd rather be reading a book.