However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
ALAN BENNETTBut then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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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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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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My experience came before most of you were born.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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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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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[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.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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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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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
ALAN BENNETT