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Quote by Anthony Burgess

Author

Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess, born on February 25, 1917, in Manchester, England, was an accomplished British writer known for his distinctive literary style and profound insights into human psychology. His works spanned various literary genres, including novels, plays, and poetry. Burgess' most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange, is one of the most celebrated works of the 20th century, exploring themes such as free will, morality, and social control. more

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“I became an ifrit to save the lives of my fellow jinn. What kind of life saver would I be if I let you sit here and wither away in paradise? Just an obstacle. Just an obstacle. I meet the ifrit's eyes. What happened to all your talk about birds and fish having nowhere to live? The ifrit shrugs. I suggest you start holding your breath, my friend, he says, then pushes through the hearing room doors.”

“I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush? We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants- perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother's womb. Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now? The truth is you turned away yourself, and decided to go into the dark alone. Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew, and that's why everything you do has some weird sense of failure in it.”

“She once complained that her stories were like 'birds bred in cages,' but that concentrated atmosphere, that claustrophobic hothouse of emotion, was her talent. Her stories were little masterpieces of compression: she succinctly contained whole lifetimes in a few pages, every moment loaded with as much as it could bear.”

“And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.”

“Between the kitchen and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The space inside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds.”