It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
ALAN BENNETTBut the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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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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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
ALAN BENNETT