Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
ALAN BENNETTIt 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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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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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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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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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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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
ALAN BENNETT