Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
ALAN BENNETTSome 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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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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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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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.
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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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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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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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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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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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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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT