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.”

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

“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”

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

“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 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.”

“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”

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