One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.

Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.

I libri non sono un passatempo. Parlano di altre vite. Di altri mondi. Altro che far passare il tempo, Sir Kevin; non so cosa darei per averne di più.

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...

Can there be any greater pleasure than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?

…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...

How do I define history? It’s just one fucking thing after another” – Rudge

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

[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...

One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here...

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.

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...

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...

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,...

Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you’ll see that literature is actually about losers.Scripps: No.Dakin: It’s consolation. All literature is consolation.

The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

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.

You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.