“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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“He felt the sadness of Lucifer.”
― Richard Condon, quote from The Manchurian Candidate
“I keep order in a world full of chaos. I am perceived as evil, but true evil? The type that people fear - it masquerades as something far more worse than darkness." ~ Luca Nicolosi, Elect by Rachel Van Dyken”
― Rachel Van Dyken, quote from Elect
“E quem é que os americanos não destruíram? Olha o que eles estão a fazer no Médio Oriente. É a mesma coisa.
…Mas os Vietnamitas derrotaram-nos, porque eram um povo unido. Ao contrário dos idiotas dos Árabes… os Ingleses puseram-nos uns contra os outros há cem anos e eles são demasiado ignorantes para o perceberem. Se fossem unidos, podiam conquistar o mundo.
…A América não vai deixar ninguém conquistar o mundo, a não ser eles próprios. Rebentam com todos nós antes de deixarem seja quem for levar vantagem.”
― Christos Tsiolkas, quote from The Slap
“RECRUITMENT Ripley Residence 2107 Mockingbird Road Vienna, Virginia January 16 1530 hours “Hello, Ben,” said the man in my living room. “My name is Alexander Hale. I work for the CIA.” And just like that, my life became interesting. It hadn’t been, up till then. Not by a long shot. That day had been a prime example: day 4,583, seven months into the twelfth year of my mundane existence. I had dragged myself out of bed, eaten breakfast, gone to middle school, been bored in class, stared at girls I was too embarrassed to approach, had lunch, slogged through gym, fallen asleep in math, been harassed by Dirk the Jerk, taken the bus home . . . And found a man in a tuxedo sitting on the couch. I didn’t doubt he was a spy for a second. Alexander Hale looked exactly like I’d always imagined a spy would. A tiny bit older, perhaps—he seemed about fifty—but still suave and debonair. He had a small scar on his chin—from a bullet, I guessed, or maybe something more exotic, like a crossbow. There was something very James Bond about him; I could imagine he’d been in a car chase on the way over and taken out the bad guys without breaking a sweat. My parents weren’t home. They never were when I got back from school. Alexander had obviously “let himself in.” The photo album from our family vacation to Virginia Beach sat open on the”
― Stuart Gibbs, quote from Spy School
“It was always like that. They never said sorry. They just threw down their still-loaded weapons, ready for next time.”
― Liane Moriarty, quote from Three Wishes
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The Violets of MarchBookQuoters 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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