233 Quotes by Alan Bennett

Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.

I note at the age of ten a fully developed ability not quite to enjoy myself, a capacity I have retained intact ever since.

Today's ideology masquerades as pragmatism with that pragmatism reduced to the simplistic assumption that the basis of human nature is self-interest, a view which discount philanthropy, discredits altruism, with the only motive deserving of trust self-promotion and self-advancement.This so-called pragmatism is wicked and it is doubly so because it is held up as being both realistic and a virtue. Whereas it is shallow, shabby and all too often callous.

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.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

Archbishop. Why do I never read the lesson?” “I beg your pardon, ma’am?” “In church. Everybody else gets to read and one never does. It’s not laid down, is it? It’s not off-limits?” “Not that I’m aware, ma’am.”“Good. Well in that case I’m going to start. Leviticus, here I come. Goodnight.” The archbishop shook his head and went back to Strictly Come Dancing.

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

Unlike today's ideologues, whom I would call single-minded if mind came into it at all, I have no fear of the state.

And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.