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
I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.
The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.
Luckily, my job demands constant reading, otherwise I’d have to figure out some other excuse.
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.
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.
Those straight-spined parishioners could justify their exhibitionism by telling themselves that they were setting an example, even educating the rest of us.
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.
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.
Like overzealous religious converts, climbers originally from the lower rungs of society tend to go overboard when they ape the upper class.
Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.
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.
Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe’s essential, civilization-building chores.
I miss that world from the safe distance of memory.
My students should be afraid: choosing what kind of work you’ll do to a great extent means choosing who you’ll be.
Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.