A Quote by Alan Bennett
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.
Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.
Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.
I may not be funny. I may not be a singer. I may not be a damn seamstress. I may have diabetes. I may have really bad vision. I may have one leg. I may not know how to read. I may not know who the vice president is. I may technically be an alien of the state. I may have a Zune. I may not know Excel. I may be two 9-year-olds in a trench coat. I may not have full control of my bowels. I may drive a '94 Honda Civic. I may not “get” cameras. I may dye my hair with Hydrogen Peroxide. I may be afraid of trees. I may be on fire right now. But I'm a fierce queen.
Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you!
Something may have happened before, and yet this thing that happened just after may be so important that you don't even know about the thing that happened before and when you tell your story to yourself, or to someone else, it's going to be told not on the basis necessarily of the time course, but rather on the basis of how it was valued by you.
Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality.
A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.
The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive.
There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.
History ... may be regarded as an artificial extension and : broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations.
Every time I see something about the Wild West, I'm reminded that our version of history may not be what really happened.
So to recap: we may or may not be going to war with Iraq because Saddam may or may not have weapons of mass destruction, which he may or may not use, or pass to other terrorists groups with whom he may or may not have links.
Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.
Writing 'Judas: The Troubling History of the Renegade Apostle' must have been a difficult task because there are no facts. Judas may quite possibly never have existed at all, and if he did, the Judas kiss may not have happened.
Mars once was wet and fertile. It's now bone dry. Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it from happening here on Earth.
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