"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 "If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree. " - Michael Crichton "I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past." - Virginia Woolf