One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
ALAN BENNETTClichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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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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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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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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