Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
ALAN BENNETTMy school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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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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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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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






