I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
ALAN BENNETTWe don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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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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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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Some 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.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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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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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
ALAN BENNETT