Anthony Burgess Quotes
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...with Indians there is an unhealthy love of the law...
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It's sapiens to be homo.
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The West is eveningland, the East morningland.
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…a fetid cabaret with a beer-bar, two houses of ill-fame disguised as coffee-shops…
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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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…British louts with guitars and emetic little songs…infantile screamers…
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‘…Your little feuilleton…recording…my crude nabob’s philistinism…’
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England become a feeble-lighted Moon of America…
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Sultan Aladdin… had few illusions about his own people: amiable, well-favoured, courteous, they loved rest better than industry… their function was to remind the toiling Chinese, Indians and British of the ultimate vanity of labour.
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Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of Californian brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strike. His clothes smelt as though they were seeped in tobacco juice. His white forlock was stained with it...
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Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a man’s life.
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Imams and muftis and kathis sat here on cushions, turbaned elders who had risen above the squalor of the flesh. The heat was tamed by wide-eyed boys with feathery fans. One of the muftis much admired one of these boys, and he stroked his buttocks with a gentle hand. The smell of the holy was wafted towards entering Bonaparte, who said with care:
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…my two chronic diseases of gluttony and satyriasis…
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…jumped-up commercials pretending, too late, to be the ruling class..
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…all heroes and heroines trying to approximate, through barriers of pigmentation, to the Hebraico-Caucasian norm of Hollywood
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Vorpal had the trick of adding a Malay enclitic to his utterances. This also had power to irritate, especially in the mornings. It irritated Nabby Adams that this should irritate him, but somewhere at the back of his brain was the contempt of the man learned in languages for the silly show-off, jingling the small change of ‘wallah’ and charpoy...
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…the Malay word chium meant to plough the beloved’s face with one’s nose
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…surely that sneered-at suburban life was more stable than this shadow life…in a country where no involvement was possible…better than the sordid dalliance that soothed me after work?
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There were…smiles of encouragement for Lydgate, and some smiles of sweet pity as well, as for the only leper present.
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Lydgate opened the sort of letter…'My dear husband I very good…I come in flying ship…we be very happy…love.' It was as satisfactory a letter as he had ever received from a woman.
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‘But you like her, don’t you?’ asked Howarth. ‘You like Mrs Connor?’ For himself, thought Howarth, he did not particularly like Mrs Connor. He desired Mrs Connor, however.
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Now we were the very good malchicks, smiling good evensong to one and all, though these wrinkled old lighters started to get all shook, their veiny old rookers all trembling round their glasses, and making the suds spill on the table. 'Leave us be, lads,' said one of them, her face all mappy with being a thousand years old, 'we’re only poor old women.'
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…the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence…
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I know little about the women of my own race...