And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETTThe days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
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.”
ALAN BENNETT -
Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
ALAN BENNETT -
But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
ALAN BENNETT -
Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
ALAN BENNETT -
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETT -
The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETT -
Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
ALAN BENNETT -
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
ALAN BENNETT -
A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
ALAN BENNETT -
You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
ALAN BENNETT






