Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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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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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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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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.
ALAN BENNETT