It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
ALAN BENNETTBut the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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.
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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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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
ALAN BENNETT