Alan Bennett Quotes
I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
Quotes to Explore
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I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.
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Obviously Hall & Oates wasn't overlooked by the masses in terms of the record sales.
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I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.
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I clean up really well. I can get dolled up.
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I would literally climb out of the cradle while my parents slept, go and crawl off. I did this a couple of times apparently. I'd cross the road and into someone's house, wake them up banging pots and pans in the kitchen.
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All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.
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I'm waiting for the time when I fail - because we all fail - and I'm ready, I'll take up carpentry.
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The truth is that we have to, as American citizens, stop thinking that this life that we're living, the things that we're dealing with, is some reality TV show. This is real life, real children, real situations.
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One can give or withhold in a manner far more effective, sophisticated, useful, which is quite invisible to people who think that giving or withholding is done by external assessment. If you seek some mark of favour or 'promotion', know that you are not ready for it. Progress comes through capacity to learn, and is irresistible. Nobody can stand between you and knowledge if you are fit for it.
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Of course, you have politics, the Vietnam war and all that monkey business. There are all kinds of reasons. At every one of those demonstrations in the late Sixties about the Vietnam war, you could guarantee there'd be a series of speeches. The ostensible purpose was to protest the war. But then somebody came up and gave a black power speech, usually Black Muslims, then. And then you'd have a women's rights speech. It was terrible to listen to these things.
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Remember: the force will be with you always...
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Even if Scrabble had been invented then, I wouldn't have wanted to play Scrabble, because the highest triple word score in the world would not have expressed how much I liked the game Natalie and I played every afternoon.
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The problem is that young people are less likely to vote than older people. What results is a situation in which sometimes the elections don't fully reflect the views of the American population.
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Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.
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Some of my unhappiest moments have been in organizations. Somehow it seems to be quite respectable to do things in organizations that you would never do in private life. I have had people insult me to my face in front of colleagues. I have had my feelings rammed down my throat on the pretext that it would do me good. I have been required to do things which I didn't agree with because the organization wished it... In my worst moments I have thought organizations were places designed to be run by sadists and staffed by masochists.
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I was raised Catholic at a time when Vatican II was just taking hold.
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Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway.
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The spooks are all cowards. Sunlight is the solution to these things.
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We don't want to impose our solutions by force, we want to create a democratic space. We don't see armed struggle in the classic sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only all-powerful truth around which everything is organized. In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. We didn't go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard.
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Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
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I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
