11 quotes
Jane has learned that there is a fate more terrible than solitude: it’s solitude in the company of a husband who essentially misunderstands you.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
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.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
As Richard Rodriguez points out in his beautiful and incisive memoir Hunger of Memory, when academics now talk on about race, class, and gender, what they’re usually talking about is race and gender.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
Books just don’t register with this crowd. They think I lack common sense; I think they lack a part of their souls.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
As someone from our adoption agency said to us before we left, “You may have been waiting for your daughter for a long time, but she has not been waiting for you.”
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
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.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
“Mr. Wonderful isn’t just going to knock on the door,” a girlfriend once said, chiding me. “Why not?” I thought. That’s the way people often meet in books—effortlessly, without guile or strategizing.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
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’.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
Now, given the consumer-pleasing politics of today’s universities, I have, in effect, seventy new bosses each semester; they’re sitting at the desks in front of me. If a teacher is not entertaining or lenient enough and her teaching evaluations plummet, she could lose the job.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
As I reread these Catholic autobiographies and novels, their odd pridefulness became clearer to me. Much of the Catholic juvenilia I so dearly remembered preached a cover story of self-denial along with a covert sermon about the spiritual and worldly superiority that would result from this self-denial. Writhe and shine.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)
I think, consciously or not, what we readers do each time we open a book is to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things, and sometimes even a few good sentences contained in an otherwise unexceptional book can crystallize vague feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or, sometimes, profound epiphanies.
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (2005)