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'You mean,' said ‘Che Ramli, 'he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.'
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Disgusting, ridiculous, when other people did it.
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It began to worry me that I could never possibly settle in England now, not after Tokyo nude-shows and sliced green chillies, brown children sluicing at the road-pump, the air-conditioned hum in bedrooms big as ballrooms, negligible income-tax, curry tiffins, being the big man in the big car, the bars of all the airports of Africa and the East.
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‘Here we go again,’ he thought. ‘Drink and reminiscence. Another day of wasted time. They’re right when they say we drink too much out here. And we slobber too much over ourselves....We’re all sorry for ourselves because we’re not big executives or artists or happily married men in a civilized temperate climate.’
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The dog now slept, occasionally farting very gently.
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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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...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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'Easier, lad, with those soft small bodies....Nothing to it. They're just soft squashy things.'
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‘She is a goddess,’ said Ambrose, drunkenly and stoutly. ‘…And she wants me. She’s the pursuer…She’s the epitome of woman, not,’ he said, ‘not a second-hand bundle of coy erogeneity draped,’ he said, ‘in an all-too-diaphanous robe,’ he said, ‘of pudeur.’
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That night we visited various places where well-shaped and scented, though completely naked, Japanese girls came to sit on male knees.
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…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…
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The Antipods…were always ready to burst.
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…he had to admit to a faint admiration (faint as angostura colouring gin and water)
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'The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.'
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'All right,' said Rowlandson. He began shakily to count out notes. Near-broken, he was still an Englishman; he would not bargain.
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I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not.
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'...reality’s always dull, you know...'
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...an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations.
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Howarth began to see that, however much it was against one’s will and convictions, sides had to be taken, the dreary corrupt world of politics had to be entered by the good and dispassionate, to protect and avenge the weak. But one always entered too late.
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…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.
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… ‘I’ve only one hobby, and that is my wife.’
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As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.
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Mr Liversedge...saw the whole ridiculous Oriental susah in true proportion. Here men would murder for five dollars, here men would seek divorce because their wives sighed at the handsomeness of the film star P.Ramlee....nodding at the lucid exposition of Mr Lim from Penang, though contemning inwardly the Pommie accent...
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From ancient drains and sewers of the language (maritime inns and brothels…), from scrawls in the catacombs…whoremasters’ chapbooks…the vocabulary of tavern brawls