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 BENNETTThe best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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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 not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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 appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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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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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETT