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 BENNETTPhilip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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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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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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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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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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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
ALAN BENNETT