“If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“When the State withers, humanity flowers.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“When we pray we admit defeat.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“I am instructed by the Home Secretary to read out the following. . . . It is a prayer devised by the Ministry of Propaganda. . . . ‘It is conceivable that the forces of death which at present are ravaging the esculent life of this planet have intelligence, in which case we beseech them to leave off. It we have done wrong--allowing in our blindness natural impulse to overcome reason--we are, of course, heartily sorry. But we submit that we have already suffered sufficiently for this wrong and we firmly resolve never to sin again. Amen.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“Why are we fighting? We're fighting because we're soldiers. That's simple enough, isn't it? For what cause are we fighting? Simple again. We're fighting to protect our country, and, in a wider sense, the whole of the English-Speaking Union. From whom? No concern of ours. Where? Wherever we're sent. Now, Foxe, I trust all this is perfectly clear.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“Late December, in Bridgwater, Somerset, Western Province, a middle-aged man named Thomas Wharnton, going home from work shortly after midnight, was set upon by youths. These knifed him, stripped him, spitted him, basted him, carved him, served him—all openly and without shame in one of the squares of the town. A hungry crowd clamoured for hunks and slices, kept back—that the King's Peace might not be broken—by munching and dripping greyboys.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“What's done can't be undone. How do I fit into this new world? I should have been warned, somebody should have told me. How was I to know that that sort of world wasn't going to go on for ever?”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“What destroys the dream? What destroys it, eh?..........Disappointment. Disappointment. Disappointment.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“History is a wheel. This sort of world can't go on for ever either.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“Was war, then, the big solution after all? Were those crude early theorists right? War the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenaline, the solvent of ennui, Angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? War itself a massive sexual act, culminating in a detumescence which was not mere metaphorical dying? War, finally, the controller, the trimmer and excisor, the justifier of fertility?”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
“Je m'en vais chercher un grand peut-etre - I go to seek a great perhaps.”
― Anthony Burgess, quote from The Wanting Seed
Anthony Burgess
Born place: in Harpurhey, England, The United Kingdom
Born date February 25, 1917
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“If she was going to die, she might as well die sarcastic.”
― Holly Black, quote from The Coldest Girl in Coldtown
“You can tell my uncle boykiller that he can cut the head off every child from here to the capital. It won't make him into a king, it will simply mean he has no one left to fuck.”
― C.S. Pacat, quote from Captive Prince: Volume Two
“We do things sometimes because we feel so much inside of us, and we don’t notice how it affects somebody else.”
― Ava Dellaira, quote from Love Letters to the Dead
“This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”
― Joan Didion, quote from The Year of Magical Thinking
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do”
― Benjamin Franklin, quote from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
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Ada, or Ardor: A Fam...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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