Anthony Burgess Quotes

…the Malay word chium meant to plough the beloved’s face with one’s nose

She sank again into the salty water...into the delicious warm brine-tasting depths of her grief.

“You mean,” said ‘Che Ramli, “he is a member of the tribe of the prophet Lot.”

I know what is love. Love is man and woman in bed.

Lim Cheng Po, Anglican, Royalist, cricketer, respectable husband and father, allowed his animal reflexes out for an avenue walk on the lead.

…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

...even the police discussed this violence as possibly coming within the scope of their terms of reference.

Trade and gambling and a woman occasionally - that was a man’s life.

…a fetid cabaret with a beer-bar, two houses of ill-fame disguised as coffee-shops…

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.

...the eyes, black, were all East - houris, harems, beds scented with Biblical spices; nose and lips were pan-Mediterranean. Her body...was that of the Shulamite and Italian film stars. The décolletage, with its promise of round, brown, infinitely smooth, vertiginous sensual treasure, was a torment to the blood....Many had promised marriage, but all had gone home, the promise unfulfilled....quite considerable capacity for all kinds of sensuous pleasure.

Rosemary was only a spinster in the strict sense of denotation. She was eminently, eminently nubile.

Rosemary’s reputation was known; he would, by obscure logic, become retrospectively a cuckold.

I decide that the East has definitely spoiled me for women.

…English translation of the Koran. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has.