Anthony Burgess Quotes
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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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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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'Easier, lad, with those soft small bodies....Nothing to it. They're just soft squashy things.'
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…death came so easily, hardly announced, without apparent cause, often greeted with smiles.
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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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She sank again into the salty water...into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief.
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The dog now slept, occasionally farting very gently.
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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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'...reality’s always dull, you know...'
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…the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold…
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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 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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I lay a little while, naked, mottled, sallow, emaciated, smoking a cigarette that should have been postcoital but was not.
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...an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations.
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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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… ‘I’ve only one hobby, and that is my wife.’
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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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'The scientific approach to life is not necessarily appropriate to states of visceral anguish.'
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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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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.
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…it was a cardinal rule in the East not to show one’s true feelings.
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'They say the church spire interferes with their bloody television reception.'