Anthony Burgess Quotes
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Ted, I noted, was very busy - at the pumps, at the glasses behind, the bottles below, the merrily ringing till, like a percussion-player in some modern work who dashes with confidence from xylophone to glockenspiel to triangle to wind-machine to big drum to tambourine.
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an Australian….They have suffered under the yoke of the English…
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…for thy huggest thy bolster, which men call a Dutch wife in some parts.
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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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'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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…the cold deflation of crapula…
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The Antipods…were always ready to burst.
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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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Nabby Adams, supine on the bed, grunted. It was four o’clock in the morning and he did not want to be talking. He had had a confused coloured dream about Bombay, shot with sharp pangs of unpaid bills. Over it all had brooded thirst, thirst for a warmish bottle of Tiger beer. Or Anchor. Or Carlsberg. He said, 'Did you bring any beer back with you?'
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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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'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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'Yes yes yes, later. For now I would ask you to proclaim next Friday from the mimbar in the masjid that the French are protectors of the faith and friends of the Prophet.'
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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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'Everything off. I want to see you in your horrific potbellied hairy filthy nakedness.'
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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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The dog now slept, occasionally farting very gently.
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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
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...the prophet of harmless solace in a harsh world....
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Him they would not harm, Englishmen being, though infidel, yet the race of past District Officers, judges, doctors, men perhaps, in their time, more helpful than otherwise, powerful but mild.
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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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…Novello should be extremely grateful that his innubile daughter was being taken off his hands by a Tasca.
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Singapura means lion-city; prehistoric, myopic, Sanskrit-speaking visitors having spotted a mangy tiger or two in the mangroves. Sly Malays sometimes call it Singa pura-pura, which means ‘pretending to be a lion’….It is a profoundly provincial town pretending to be a metropolis.
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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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That night we visited various places where well-shaped and scented, though completely naked, Japanese girls came to sit on male knees.