But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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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.
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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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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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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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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