I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
ALAN BENNETTIt’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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 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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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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