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.
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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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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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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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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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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[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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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