Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETTAnd if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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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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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
ALAN BENNETT