Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
ALAN BENNETTTo read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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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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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT