One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
ALAN BENNETTI’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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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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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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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 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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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETT