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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...a victim of bad medicine, bad air, bad food, farcical education, a despicable popular culture.
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I decide that the East has definitely spoiled me for women.
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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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'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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The East would always present that calm face of faint astonishment, unmoved at the anger, not understanding the bitterness.
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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 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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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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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.
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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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Her face was that of a boy gang-leader, smooth with the innocence of one who, by the same quirk as blinds a man to the mystery of whistling or riding a bicycle, has never mastered the art of affection or compassion or properly learned the moral dichotomy.
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…a fetid cabaret with a beer-bar, two houses of ill-fame disguised as coffee-shops…
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…British louts with guitars and emetic little songs…infantile screamers…
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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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…no European whore’s mock-respectability.
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The West is eveningland, the East morningland.
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‘…I prefer to think of young women less as human beings than as pimply parcels of televisual reflexes.’
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‘…Your little feuilleton…recording…my crude nabob’s philistinism…’
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I was only the returned Oriental eccentric, drunk at that…
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Rosemary’s reputation was known; he would, by obscure logic, become retrospectively a cuckold.
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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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...with Indians there is an unhealthy love of the law...