If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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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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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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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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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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