Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
Alan BennettRead
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
Interpretation
Books reflect and reveal truths about life rather than being mere vessels of personal experiences.
This quote suggests that literature serves as a mirror to our existence. Instead of just pouring our life experiences into our writing, we often discover and understand our own lives and the human experience through reading and engaging with literature. This encourages a deeper connection with the narrative structures that echo our realities and feelings.
In practice
During a book club discussion about the transformative power of literature.
Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
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.
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
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 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
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
There are three difficulties in authorship; to write any thing worth the publishing β to find honest men to publish it β and to get sensible men to read it.
I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
He didn't want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.
Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.
I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
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