I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
ALAN BENNETTWe have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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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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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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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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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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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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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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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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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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
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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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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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.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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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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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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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.
ALAN BENNETT