“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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“Smiles and tears are so alike with me, they are neither of them confined to any particular feelings: I often cry when I am happy, and smile when I am sad.”
― Anne Brontë, quote from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
“Gold winked at his wrist as he pressed his choice for two coffees on the AutoChef built into the side panel. "Cream?"
"Black."
"A woman after my own heart." Moments later, he opened the protective door and offered her a china cup in a delicate saucer. "We have more of a selection on the plane," he said, then settled back with his coffee.
"I bet." The steam rising from her cup smelled like heaven. Eve took a tentative sip -- and nearly moaned.
It was real. No simulation made from vegetable concentrate so usual since the depletion of the rain forests in the late twentieth. This was the real thing, ground from rich Columbian beans, singing with caffeine.
She sipped again, and could have wept.
"Problem?" He enjoyed her reaction immensely, the flutter of the lashes, the faint flush, the darkening of the eyes -- a similar response, he noted, to a woman purring under a man's hands.
"Do you know how long it's been since I had real coffee?"
He smiled. "No."
"Neither do I." Unashamed, she closed her eyes as she lifted the cup again. "You'll have to excuse me, this is a private moment. We'll talk on the plane.”
― J.D. Robb, quote from Naked in Death
“Damon’s voice was no louder than before. “Get away from my brother.” Bonnie could feel it inside him, a swell of Power like a tsunami. He continued, “Before I tear your heart out.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Fury / Dark Reunion
“He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths.”
― John Howard Griffin, quote from Black Like Me
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations
Excellent Women
False Memory
Day Watch
Sworn to Silence
The Guardian
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