The Wanting Seed Quotes

“If you expect the worst from a person you can never be disappointed.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“When the State withers, humanity flowers.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“Life's only choosing when to die. Life's a big postponement because the choice is so difficult. It's a tremendous relief not to have to choose.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“When we pray we admit defeat.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“What destroys the dream? What destroys it, eh?..........Disappointment. Disappointment. Disappointment.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“But if you eat this chap who's God,' said Llewelyn stoutly, 'how can it be horrible? If it's alright to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?'

'Because,' said Dymphna reasonably, ' if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished...”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“I am instructed by the Home Secretary to read out the following. . . . It is a prayer devised by the Ministry of Propaganda. . . . ‘It is conceivable that the forces of death which at present are ravaging the esculent life of this planet have intelligence, in which case we beseech them to leave off. It we have done wrong--allowing in our blindness natural impulse to overcome reason--we are, of course, heartily sorry. But we submit that we have already suffered sufficiently for this wrong and we firmly resolve never to sin again. Amen.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“The intellectuals have never been on the side of the workers. Sometimes they’ve let on to be, but only for purposes of betrayal.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“Why are we fighting? We're fighting because we're soldiers. That's simple enough, isn't it? For what cause are we fighting? Simple again. We're fighting to protect our country, and, in a wider sense, the whole of the English-Speaking Union. From whom? No concern of ours. Where? Wherever we're sent. Now, Foxe, I trust all this is perfectly clear.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“Late December, in Bridgwater, Somerset, Western Province, a middle-aged man named Thomas Wharnton, going home from work shortly after midnight, was set upon by youths. These knifed him, stripped him, spitted him, basted him, carved him, served him—all openly and without shame in one of the squares of the town. A hungry crowd clamoured for hunks and slices, kept back—that the King's Peace might not be broken—by munching and dripping greyboys.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding of human satisfaction.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“What's done can't be undone. How do I fit into this new world? I should have been warned, somebody should have told me. How was I to know that that sort of world wasn't going to go on for ever?”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“Je m'en vais chercher un grand peut-etre - I go to seek a great perhaps.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“What is it we drink to?"
(...)
"A lot of things. Life. Freedom. The sea.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“Sand-hoppers, mermaids' purses, sea gooseberries, cuttle bones, wrasse, blenny and and bullhead, tern, gannet and herring gull.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“Was war, then, the big solution after all? Were those crude early theorists right? War the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenaline, the solvent of ennui, Angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? War itself a massive sexual act, culminating in a detumescence which was not mere metaphorical dying? War, finally, the controller, the trimmer and excisor, the justifier of fertility?”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed

“History is a wheel. This sort of world can't go on for ever either.”
― Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed