1
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.Alan Bennett
2
One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.Alan Bennett
3
Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.Alan Bennett
4
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.Alan Bennett
5
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.Alan Bennett
6
...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice... Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.Alan Bennett
7
The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.Alan Bennett
8
What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.Alan Bennett
9
Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.Alan Bennett
10
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.Alan Bennett
11
Archbishop. Why do I never read the lesson?” “I beg your pardon, ma’am?” “In church. Everybody else gets to read and one never does. It’s not laid down, is it? It’s not off-limits?” “Not that I’m aware, ma’am.”“ Good. Well in that case I’m going to start. Leviticus, here I come. Goodnight.” The archbishop shook his head and went back to Strictly Come Dancing.Alan Bennett
12
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.Alan Bennett
13
To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.Alan Bennett
14
I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.Alan Bennett
15
I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.Alan Bennett
16
One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.Alan Bennett
17
And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.Alan Bennett