To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
ALAN BENNETTSo boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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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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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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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
ALAN BENNETT