Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
ALAN BENNETTLife is generally something that happens elsewhere.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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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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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.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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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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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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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.
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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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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?
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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