It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
ALAN BENNETT…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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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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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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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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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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[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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
ALAN BENNETT