You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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.
[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.
…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.
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.
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.
Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
Pass the parcel. That’s sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That’s the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
How do I define history? It’s just one fucking thing after another
It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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.
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.
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.
I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.
Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement.
Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn’t be able to write about.