It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
ALAN BENNETTSo boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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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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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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