Down and Out in Paris and London

by George Orwell

You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in here”’–he tapped his forehead–‘and you’re all right.’

‘Have you ever seen a corpse burned? I have, in India. They put the old chap on the fire, and the next moment I almost jumped out of my skin, because he’d started kicking. It was only his muscles contracting in the heat–still, it give me a turn. Well, he wriggled about for a bit like a kipper on hot coals, and then his belly blew up and went off with a bang you could have heard fifty yards away. It fair put me against cremation.’

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him),