Anthony Burgess Quotes
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The dog looked up through its hairy yashmak and farted.
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He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them.
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'And now,' Herod calmly said, 'You can kill all the new-born....Kill them all....take your men and let your men take their swords. Make sure they're sharp. To Bethlehem. Hack. Lunge. Chop. Kill.'
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'...I’m a typical Englishman of my class - a crank idealist.'
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'How can slaves be sent by Allah? You all have hairless faces, the mark of the bondman.'
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'The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories....Common criminals...can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all.'
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Rosemary was only a spinster in the strict sense of denotation. She was eminently, eminently nubile.
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‘They’ll be in all our houses,’ I said, ‘blackies of all colours, before the century’s over. The new world belongs to Asia.
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...To the mother hubbard girl, whose name seemed to be Janie: ‘It becomes you, it does really, that chunk of filthy butter muslin, but then you’re the sort of girl who could get away with anything, even having one tit bigger than the other.’ He did a comic oenophil act with the bottle of Marsovin...
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‘So she was Greek, was she?’ said Sir Benjamin. ‘Well, well. I suppose the new vice laws are driving some of them out of Soho. Driving them down here,’ he said, as though a whole new world were opening up. ‘Well.’
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Relief brought an aching desire to be sitting in a kedai with a large bottle of Tiger or Anchor or Carlsberg in front of him....
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‘I know what is love. Love is man and woman in bed.’
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…of course, keep-fit people are no good in bed…
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...the bathroom which Crabbe visited showed signs that Moneypenny now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory.
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‘it excites the pancreas to fresh efforts’
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There must always be somebody. However young or insignificant. There has to be somebody who comes from nowhere to say what others are too foolish or too frightened to say.
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...he became one with his Chinese parishioners, announcing a trade as honest as that of the dentist, the seller of rice-wine, the brothel-keeper, the purveyor of quack rejuvenators and aphrodisiacs, or the vendor of shark’s-fin strips.
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It was all a matter of a Goddess – dark, hidden, deadly, horribly desirable.
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…enjoyed Dravidian transports.
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'…And the rising sun shall rise yet higher, destroying with its flaming fire the evil will of the wicked West, but smiling warmly on the rest'
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The important thing is to get yourself born. You’re entitled to that. But you’re not entitled to life. Because if you were entitled to life, then the life would have to be quantified. How many years? Seventy? Sixty? Shakespeare was dead at fifty-two. Keats was dead at twenty-six. Thomas Chatterton at seventeen.
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'What's it going to be then, eh?'
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Love seems inevitable, necessary, as normal and as easy a process as respiration.