Anthony Burgess Quotes
-
Disgusting, ridiculous, when other people did it.
-
She sank again into the salty water...into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief.
-
…he had to admit to a faint admiration (faint as angostura colouring gin and water)
-
'You mean,' said ‘Che Ramli, 'he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.'
-
'Easier, lad, with those soft small bodies....Nothing to it. They're just soft squashy things.'
-
The dog now slept, occasionally farting very gently.
-
'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.'
-
That night we visited various places where well-shaped and scented, though completely naked, Japanese girls came to sit on male knees.
-
'The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.'
-
'All right,' said Rowlandson. He began shakily to count out notes. Near-broken, he was still an Englishman; he would not bargain.
-
...the dark brought out the prostitutes, Malay divorcees mostly, quietly moving from light to light, gaudy and graceful, like other of night’s creatures.
-
‘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.’
-
The Antipods…were always ready to burst.
-
'...reality’s always dull, you know...'
-
...an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations.
-
I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not.
-
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.
-
…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.
-
…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…
-
… ‘I’ve only one hobby, and that is my wife.’
-
From ancient drains and sewers of the language (maritime inns and brothels…), from scrawls in the catacombs…whoremasters’ chapbooks…the vocabulary of tavern brawls
-
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...
-
As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.
-
Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial.