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Headmaster: Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

— Alan Bennett Forty Years On (1969)

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Memory

More quotes by Alan Bennett

To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

Writing Home (1994)

I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.

Writing Home (1994)

I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.

An Englishman Abroad (1983)

The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.

Writing Home (1994)

The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.

Writing Home (1994)

All Alan Bennett quotes →

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Women and elephants never forget an injury.

Saki Reginald (1904)

Man should possess an infinite appetite for life. It should be self-evident to him, all the time, that life is superb, glorious, endlessly rich, infinitely desirable.

Colin Wilson The Philosopher's Stone (1969)

To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.

Thomas Campbell

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

William James The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Alan Bennett (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.