If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETT[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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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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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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
ALAN BENNETT