Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? - Anthony Burgess

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

Shined, combed, brushed and gorgeous

Stamping around, waiting, I cursed England aloud, hands dug deep into pockets, dancing to the wind that knocked in vain at the Sunday shops. Cigarette-packets, football fixtures, bus-tickets sailed by in dust-ghosts of Saturday. A woman with a puce face and a blancmange-coloured prayer-book was waiting also for The Priest and Pig, and she looked puce disapproval at me. Twenty minutes late, the bus yawned in from town, near-empty, and it swallowed us in a gape of Sunday ennui. So we sundayed along, rattling and creaking in Sunday hollowness, I upstairs, tearing my elevenpenny ticket while I read the prospectus of Winter Commercial Classes stuck on the window.

…I prefer to think of [young women] less as human beings than as pimply parcels of televisual reflexes.