We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETTOur perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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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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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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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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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.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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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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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT