[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
ALAN BENNETTIt [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
ALAN BENNETT -
Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
ALAN BENNETT -
Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
ALAN BENNETT -
I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
ALAN BENNETT -
It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
ALAN BENNETT -
It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
ALAN BENNETT -
The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
ALAN BENNETT