It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
ALAN BENNETTWe started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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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






