Anthony Burgess Quotes
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His heart beating faster, his throat drying, Nabby whispered to the driver, ‘Not so bloody fast.’ ‘Tuan?’ ‘All right, all right.’ One of these days he must really get down to the language. There never seemed to be the time, somehow....
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'Prison religion'...
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'But what happens when you die?' 'You’re finished with,' Enderby said promptly. 'Done for. And even if you weren’t – well, you die then, gasp your last, then you’re sort of wandering, free of body. You wander around and then you come in contact with a sort of big thing. What is this big thing? God, if you like.'
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I decide that the East has definitely spoiled me for women.
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There was a silence. Outside, and most unfortunately, a boy could be heard calling to another boy: ‘Piss off, Cowie.’ Stern looks were fixed on Woolton.
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...a victim of bad medicine, bad air, bad food, farcical education, a despicable popular culture.
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The East would always present that calm face of faint astonishment, unmoved at the anger, not understanding the bitterness.
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She gave the lie to the European superstition - chiefly a missionary superstition - that the women of the East are downtrodden.
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The Christian ecumenical movement will have reached its limit, meaning that Catholicism will have turned into Protestantism and Protestantism into agnosticism....But Islam will not have lost any of its rigour....Supernature abhors a supervacuum. With the death of institutional Christianity will come the spread of Islam.
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It had, perhaps, not been a very edifying life. On the booze in England, in India, in Malaya… And then a couple of gins for breakfast and then the first beers of the day in a kedai … He had been driven out of that Eden…because of his sinful desire to taste what was forbidden.
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…no European whore’s mock-respectability.
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I was only the returned Oriental eccentric, drunk at that…
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…English translation of the Koran. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has.
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'It was not seemly to raise your flags on the minarets.'
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…a man who sold meat but knew nothing of the poetry of the slaughterhouse…. Ted Arden was no ice-cream butcher.
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It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
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Well-fed and liquored, I responded with ardour.
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Edwin, so much himself a sham, felt a sort of kinship with the sham pleasures of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street as they travelled painfully towards Soho.
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He would milk the white man....The white man had more money than sense.
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Around them the gawping locals sat, amazed with an amazement that never grew less…
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'…Just you bloody hypocrites with your four wives and your ten thousand houris in heaven?…'
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Rosemary’s reputation was known; he would, by obscure logic, become retrospectively a cuckold.
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England become a feeble-lighted Moon of America…
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My dear Hardman, It was pleasant... I am sorry that your Oriental venture has not been going as well as you expected. But, then, I think that the days when a man could expect to make his fortune in the East are dead and gone. Indeed, the time seems to have come for the reverse of the old process to apply, and for the East to dominate the West.