Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
ALAN BENNETTHave you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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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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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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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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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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My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETT