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.
ALAN BENNETTIt’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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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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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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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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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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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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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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