Alan Bennett Quotes

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.

I come from a family of coal miners.

I was shaped by a pit environment and the Second World War. My playground was on the pit tip at Clay Cross and I grew up with that mining background. My father was a miner and my granddad was a miner, and I would say three out of ten on the street where I was born were working in the pits.

An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.

I could write about coal miners in Northern Pennsylvania, and people would ask if I was writing about my dad.

No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems.

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul You live again in time, slender and silent.

I guess it's a sequel to our story From the journey 'tween heaven and hell With half the time thinking of what might have been and half thinkin' just as well. I guess only time will tell.

I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and of people who will see a world that I shall never know.

If I would have been in a different world Like I frequently am when I see you Oh I might have missed All the ways you try to give If only you knew what you do to me Sometimes I think about eternity If it would have been another time I wonder what you would of had in mind

Time has a funny way of collapsing when you go back to a place you once loved. You find yourself thinking, I was kissed in that building, I climbed up that tree.

Sometimes we have only ten minutes to be with the love of our life and thousands of hours to spend thinking about them.

I think Heaven will not be as good as earth, unless it bring with it that sweet power to remember, which is the staple of Heaven here.

Help me to withstand your beauty as it stands out of reach. Give me the capacity to forget ever having felt your touch.

In music I feel most deeply the passing of things.

I notice the silvery hair at his temples with a tinge of sadness. Why do parents grow old? Life is a castle of lies slowly dismantled by the passage of time. I regret not spending more time looking at the people I love.

I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.

Hawaii made the mouth of her soul water.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that ofttimes hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

As I was walking up the stairs to dad's old room, and I was looking at the photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories. That someone actually took the photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something.

To think, after all this time, after all the searching and all the waiting, after all the regret and the time she'd spent away, she came back to find that happiness was right where she's left it. On a football field in Mullaby, North Carolina. Waiting for her.

I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again.