Anthony Burgess Quotes
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…the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence…
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‘What you could do with is a nice strong cup of tea, sir. I’ll tell the kuki to make you one.’ ‘Does it really do any good, Nabby? (That was better.) ‘I’ve tried every damn thing.’....
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'My darling one....I shall be thinking of you while you are away and hope you will remember to wrap up warm when you go out at night.'
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The window opened gently and a still Autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil.
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I know little about the women of my own race...
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The Turks would do anything with a captured screaming infidel body - make it chew its own penis, thrust the testicles up the anus, saw the noseless earless head off with slow delicacy.
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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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‘…Women I do not much care for myself - I prefer little Greek shepherd-boys…’
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'You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.'
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Mr Raj had been purely Orientally and fancifully complimentary (‘So great a man, his lingam as long and thick as a tree, the father of whole villages’).
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After all, what bit of money I’ve made has been made among mosquitoes and sand-flies, snakes in the bedroom, long monotonous damp heat, boredom, exasperation with native clerks. Who are these sweet stay-at-homes, sweet well-contents, to try and suck it out of me and feel aggrieved if they can’t have it?
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‘…you read mostly menus and the moles on whores’ bellies….’
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'…as the cinema shows us, they are much more accessible and, for that matter, much more wanton than our own women'
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'As for your circumcisions, the chief modin can arrange all. Your wine must return to the earth, whence the grape came. Haram.'
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'Salam aleikum.'
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'We're in control, and we have what we want!'
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'Brutality!' cried Tristam. The class was at last interested. 'Beatings-up. Secret police. Torture in brightly lighted cellars. Condemnation without trial. Finger-nails pulled out with pincers. The rack. The cold-water treatment. The gouging out of eyes. The firing squad in the cold dawn. And all this because of disappointment. The Interphase.'
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'Easier, lad, with those soft small bodies....Nothing to it. They're just soft squashy things.'
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…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…
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She sank again into the salty water...into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief.
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...the dark brought out the prostitutes, Malay divorcees mostly, quietly moving from light to light, gaudy and graceful, like other of night’s creatures.
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'…My name…is Mahalingam….is Sanskrit for ‘large or great or mighty generative organ’ - this, of course, having more a religious (through associations of religion and fertility) significance than an anatomical one. Though anatomically and…socially the name has not proved inept.
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'We believe in Allah, we take the Koran as a sacred book. In our land we broke the power of infidel Rum, in his own land we struck down her Sultan whom men called the Pope, in Malta we slew the Knights, sworn enemies of Islam. Inform your people that we are sent by Allah to geld the evil Turk and raise high the people of the Nile.'
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…death came so easily, hardly announced, without apparent cause, often greeted with smiles.