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.
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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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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.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT