Sonam > Sonam's Quotes

“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

“Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“It was the kind of library
he had only read about in books.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“I think of literature,' she wrote, 'as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but will never reach. And I have started to late. I will never catch up.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“In the pale light of daybreak the gravestones looked like so many white sails that would never again be filled with wind, sails that, too long unused and heavily drooping, had been turned into stone just as they were. The boats' anchors had been thrust so deeply into the dark earth that they could never again be raised.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sound of Waves

“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

“...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, The Uncommon Reader

“Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“One has met and indeed entertained many visiting heads of state, some of them unspeakable crooks and blackguards....One has given one's white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore....Sometimes one has felt like a scented candle, sent in to perfume a regime, or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deoderant.”
― Alan Bennett The Uncommon Reader

“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, The Uncommon Reader

“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The best teacher is experience and not through someone's distorted point of view”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I wished I was on the same bus as her. A pain stabbed my heart as it did everytime I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“I had nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“We lay on our backs looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when he made life so sad and disinclined. ”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“The whole universe was crazy and cock-eyed and extremely strange.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch. Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just go along. I dig life.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“How frail the human heart must be―a mirrored pool of thought.”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft