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“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. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“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, The Uncommon Reader

“You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“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, The Uncommon Reader

“A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot."

[Baffled at a Bookcase (London Review of Books, Vol. 33 No. 15, 28 July 2011)]”
― Alan Bennett

“But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.”
― Alan Bennett , The Uncommon Reader

“It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
― Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

“Madness is the acme of intelligence.”
― Naguib Mahfouz

“The heart is a place of secrets...”
― Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights & Days

“...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“قال لنفسه إنه لا نجاة له إلا بالجنون. الجنون وحده هو الذي يتسع للإيمان والكفر، للمجد والخزي، للحب والخداع، للصدق والكذب، أما العقل فكيف يتحمل هذه الحياة الغريبة؟ كيف يشيم ألق النجوم وهو مغروس حتى قمة رأسه في الوحل؟!”
― Naguib Mahfouz, حضرة المحترم

“We wont develop until we accept that reading is a vital necessity.”
― Naguib Mahfouz

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“[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, The Uncommon Reader

“أن الجريمة التي تفلت من العقاب تكرس الإثم بين الناس وتزعزع الثقة في العدالة الإلهية وتمهد لارتكاب المزيد من الجرائم”
― Naguib Mahfouz, Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth

“: قال الشيخ عبد ربه التائه
في الكون تسبح المشيئة ، وفي المشيئة يسبح الكون”
― نجيب محفوظ, أصداء السيرة الذاتية

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
― sylvia plath

“I've never had a moment's doubt. I love you. I believe in you completely. You are my dearest one. My reason for life. Cee”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.”
― Ian McEwan

“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, The Uncommon Reader

“I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?”
― Alan Bennett

“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath