Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
11 quotes
"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."
"Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up."
"The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do."
"Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds."
"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."
"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."
"To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish."
"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."
"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."
"One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty."
"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."