Maureen Corrigan Quotes (5 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Maureen Corrigan: 5 quotes 0 likes

Famous Maureen Corrigan Quotes

“Angels in the house always die in the books they preside over because early ascension into heaven is their reward—and because their goodness makes them boring.”

Maureen Corrigan

Source: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005), Chapter 4 (p. 141)

“Books just don’t register with this crowd. They think I lack common sense; I think they lack a part of their souls.”

Maureen Corrigan

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
Source: Interlude, “Books, What a Jolly Company They Are” (p. 57)

“We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our own life stories and—equally important—to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others’.”

Maureen Corrigan

Source: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005), Chapter 1 (p. 34)

“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

Source: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005), Introduction (p. xvii)

“I don’t believe in identity politics in literature—or in life much, either. Indeed the current scholarly enchantment with identity politics strikes me as a more intellectual version of the warning oft heard around Sunnyside when I was growing up: “Stick with your own kind.””

Maureen Corrigan

Source: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005), Chapter 2 (p. 70)
Context: Family and cultural origins are crucial to self-definition, but they’re not the end of the story. I certainly don’t think that we readers only or even chiefly enjoy or understand books whose main characters mirror us. In fact, the opportunity to become who we are decidedly not—whether it’s Amis’s Dixon or Philip Roth’s Portnoy or Ellison’s Invisible Man or Kafka’s beetle—is one of the greatest gifts reading offers. Women readers get to serve on that floating boy’s club, the Pequod; male readers get to step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes and teach Mr. Darcy the dance of humility; readers of either gender who are not African American get to crawl toward freedom alongside Toni Morrison’s Sethe. One of the most magical and liberating things about literature is that it can transport us readers into worlds totally unlike our own.