Frases de Anthony Burgess

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“Ser bueno puede llegar a ser algo horrible.”

“Quizás el hombre que elige el mal es en cierto modo mejor que aquel a quien se le impone el bien”

“El hombre que no puede elegir ha perdido la condición humana.”

“Pero hermanos, este morderse las uñas acerca de la causa de la maldad es lo que me da verdadera risa. No les preocupa saber cuál es la causa de la bondad, y entonces, ¿por qué quieren averiguar el otro asunto? Si los liudos (individuos) son buenos es porque les gusta, y ni se me ocurriría interferir en sus placeres, así que lo mismo deberían hacer en el otro negocio. Y yo soy cliente del otro negocio.”

“Hay pecado supongo, pero el castigo fue del todo desproporcionado. Te han convertido en algo que ya no es una criatura humana. Ya no estás en condiciones de elegir. Estás obligado a tener una conducta que la sociedad considera aceptable, y eres una máquina que sólo puede hacer bien".”

“Algunas veces no es grato ser bueno, pequeño 6655321. Ser bueno puede llegar a ser algo horrible. Y te lo digo sabiendo que quizá te parezca una afirmación muy contradictoria. Sé que esto me costará muchas noches de insomnio. ¿Qué quiere Dios? ¿El bien o que uno elija el camino del bien? Quizás el hombre que elige el mal es en cierto modo mejor que aquel a quien se le impone el bien. Son problemas profundos y difíciles, pequeño 6655321.”

“Él ordeñaría al hombre blanco ... El hombre blanco tenía más dinero que sentido.”

“(Singapur) no es ni siquiera un lugar donde a un hombre blanco se le permite desmoronarse...”

“¿Es mejor para un hombre haber elegido el mal que tener el bien impuesto sobre él?”

“Bueno, que me cuelguen si no es ese gordo maloliente, el cabrón Billy y toda la porquería. ¿Cómo estás, botellón de aceite de cocina barato? Acércate, que te daré una en los yarblocos, si es que los tienes, eunuco grasiento.”

“Las cosas serán siempre peores, nunca mejores.
Qué nuevo mundo están preparándose ustedes.”

“Es tan inhumano ser totalmente bueno como totalmente malvado. Lo importante es la elección moral.”

“El enfoque científico de la vida no es necesariamente apropiado para los estados de angustia visceral.”

“... ¿Solo ustedes malditos hipócritas con sus cuatro esposas y sus diez mil horas en el cielo? ...”

“Bien alimentado y licuado, respondí con ardor.”

“Los escritores no son, por naturaleza, respetables: su función es ser subversivos.”

“¿Qué va a pasar entonces, eh?”

“Me curé bien.”

“... Tu pequeño feuilleton ... grabando ... el crudo filisteísmo de mi nabob ...”

“excita el páncreas a nuevos esfuerzos”

“La iglesia sostiene que puede ser maltratada, pero los puños que la maltratan conocen su propia impotencia.”

“Las lenguas nunca se detienen. La ortografía moderna cristaliza las pronunciaciones perdidas: lo visual nunca alcanza a lo auditivo.”

“… Prefiero pensar en las [mujeres jóvenes] menos como seres humanos que como parcelas llenas de reflejos televisivos.”

“Mientras caminaba hacia el viaje, esa ilusión de liberación, extrañamente me sentí caminando de regreso a la infancia.”

“Todo fuera Quiero verte en tu horrible desnudez sucia, peluda y barrigada.”

“…like a ship, clean and trim on a dirty sea of pox and camel-dung.”

“… ‘I’ve only one hobby, and that is my wife.”

“So she was Greek, was she?’ said Sir Benjamin. ‘Well, well. I suppose the new vice laws are driving some of them out of Soho. Driving them down here,’ he said, as though a whole new world were opening up. ‘Well.”

“I am near the end of the wine, sweet lords and lovely ladies, but out there the big wine is being poured – thin, slow, grey. Never more shall I taste the oncoming of this particular darkness. But I shall not be sorry to go. I am not seduced by the dainty lusts, clothed in cold green and clean linen, of an English spring. If you plunge into that dark there you will emerge at length into a raging sun and all the fabled islands of my East. And that is what I shall be doing tonight, off like a bird. I see you have your pennies ready, ladies. Twitch not, hop not about nor writhe so: I shall not be long now.”

“They say the church spire interferes with their bloody television reception.”

“I had felt sick before and had been saved by Sekt. Now I was beginning to feel sick of the Sekt. I would, I knew, shortly have to vomit…. I started gently to move towards one of the open windows. The aims of the artistic policy enunciated by the National Chamber of Film might, said Goebbels, be expressed under seven headings. Oh Christ. First, the articulation of the sense of racial pride, which might, without reprehensible arrogance, be construed as a just sense of racial superiority. Just, I thought, moving towards the breath of the autumn dark, like the Jews, just like the. This signified, Goebbels went on, not narrow German chauvinism but a pride in being of the great original Aryan race, once master of the heartland and to be so again. The Aryan destiny was enshrined in the immemorial Aryan myths, preserved without doubt in their purest form in the ancient tongue of the heartland. Second. But at this point I had made the open window. With relief the Sekt that seethed within me bore itself mouthward on waves of reverse peristalsis. Below me a great flag with a swastika on flapped gently in the night breeze of autumn. It did not now lift my heart; it was not my heart that was lifting. I gave it, with gargoyling mouth, a litre or so of undigested Sekt. And then some strings of spittle. It was not, perhaps, as good as pissing on the flag, but, in retrospect, it takes on a mild quality of emblematic defiance…”

“Well before James Joyce, Conrad was forging a vocabulary for the contemporary soul. This book grants us another opportunity to brood over a notable literary martyrdom.”

“Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.”

“…in the Restoration period, feeling and imagination were mistrusted: feeling implied strong convictions, and strong convictions had produced a Civil War and the harsh rule of the Commonwealth; imagination suggested the mad, the wild, the uncouth, the fanatical. It was best to live a calm civilised life governed by reason. Such a life is best lived in the town, and the town is the true centre of culture; the country estates are impoverished, and little of interest is going on there; the country itself is barbaric.”

“…for thy huggest thy bolster, which men call a Dutch wife in some parts.”

“Nabby Adams, supine on the bed, grunted. It was four o’clock in the morning and he did not want to be talking. He had had a confused coloured dream about Bombay, shot with sharp pangs of unpaid bills. Over it all had brooded thirst, thirst for a warmish bottle of Tiger beer. Or Anchor. Or Carlsberg. He said, 'Did you bring any beer back with you?”

“There he lieth, tossing in the guilt of his lewdness, the primal lecher, neglectful of his duties to a fair wife but all too ready to plunge his sizzling steel into the slaking black mud of a base Indian.”

“As I walked towards travel, that illusion of liberation, I strangely felt myself walking back into childhood.”

“The church stands that it may be battered, but the fists that batter know their own impotence.”

“The East would always present that calm face of faint astonishment, unmoved at the anger, not understanding the bitterness.”

“The rain eased off, but the streets were greasily wet, rainbowed with oil. I went to the bank for more five-pound notes, stood like a pauper in the public library reading the Christian Science Monitor, then went for the first drinks of the day to a dive-bar popular with merchants. Hungarian refugees waited on at the tables and a West Indian negro collected dirty glasses – we were all exiles together.”

“He stayed in no one place very long, but he usually managed to absorb something of the atmosphere of each town, village or rubber estate he visited, and he always made quick contact with the local residents. These residents were invariably Europeans - planters, colonial officials, businessmen, or just men living in exile to escape from trouble or sadness at home - and there is little evidence that Maugham gained, or wished to gain, any direct knowledge of the lives and customs of the native peoples of the East. This must be disappointing to present-day Malay and Indian and Chinese and Eurasian readers of his stories, but we have to remember that (apart from the fact that Maugham had no time to learn Malay or Chinese or Tamil) the Western attitude to the Far East was very different in Maugham's time from what it is today.”

“Carlo looked as at the world of fallen man on the endless suburbs that passed for a city, an eatery in the likeness of a Sphinx (enter between its forepaws), another, for jumbo malts so thick you can't suck 'em through a straw, in the form of an elephant crouched as at the bidding of its mahout, gimcrack temples of various faiths, attap roofs of nutburger stands with Corinthian columns, loans loans loans, stores crammed with cutprice radios, a doughnuttery, homes like Swiss chalets, like Bavarian castles, miniature Blenheims, Strawberry Hills, Taj Mahals, a bank in the form of a tiny ocean liner, dusty trees on the boulevards (datepalm, orange, oleander), bars with neon bottles endlessly pouring, colleges for stuntmen, beauticians, morticians, degrees in drummajoretteship.”

“Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial.”

“She was an appetising woman with a full-cheeked smile, about thirty, a Nordic blonde but not icy, though ice was suggested in its tamed winter-sport aspects : the flush after skating, log-fires and hot rum and butter, fine heavy thighs, that would warm your hand like a muff, under a skirt that had swirled in a rink waltz. Her beaver lamb coat was thrust back from a green suit : solid charms, thoroughly wholesome, were indicated.”

“Yes yes yes, later. For now I would ask you to proclaim next Friday from the mimbar in the masjid that the French are protectors of the faith and friends of the Prophet.”

“…he became one with his Chinese parishioners, announcing a trade as honest as that of the dentist, the seller of rice-wine, the brothel-keeper, the purveyor of quack rejuvenators and aphrodisiacs, or the vendor of shark’s-fin strips.”

“You are admitting, then, to frivolity of attitude to important global problems?”

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

“If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilised discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.”

“I was only the returned Oriental eccentric, drunk at that…”

“What we used to think of as exotic can now only be found in countries that cannot afford Americanization. Meaning no home comforts, peppers, unleavened bread. It is a kind thing to take one’s bit of tourist money there, to the deserving, and not put it in the hands of the disdainful Nicois or Cannois. If you can get into a country which is politically oppressed, that too is a good thing for the natives, for you are bringing a breath of freedom. Increasingly, perhaps, one ought to be travelling for the benefit of those who cannot afford or are not permitted to travel. We all belong to one another now, and no foreign country ought to be merely a sideshow….”

“After all, what bit of money I’ve made has been made among mosquitoes and sand-flies, snakes in the bedroom, long monotonous damp heat, boredom, exasperation with native clerks. Who are these sweet stay-at-homes, sweet well-contents, to try and suck it out of me and feel aggrieved if they can’t have it?”

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