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.
ALAN BENNETTOnly when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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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.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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The 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.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
ALAN BENNETT