Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
ALAN BENNETTWe still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETT






