The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
ALAN BENNETTA book, as it were, closes the book.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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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 dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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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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
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
ALAN BENNETT






