I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
ALAN BENNETTI 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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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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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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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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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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
ALAN BENNETT