To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
ALAN BENNETTBooks are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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