At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
ALAN BENNETTBooks are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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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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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT