So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
ALAN BENNETTHistory is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
ALAN BENNETT