A Dead Man in Deptford Quotes

“Blessed tree and blessed birds, that were to be neither saved nor damned.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“The entrant mooed like a calf but in insolence looked about him. Hew saw Kit. Kit saw him. Nay, it was more than pure seeing. It was Jove's bolt. It was, to borrow from the papists, the bell of the consecration. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth in the disguise of danger. Both went out together, and it was as if they were entering, rather than leaving, the corridor outside with its sour and burly servant languidly asweep with his broom, the major-domo in livery hovering, transformed to a sweet bower of assignation, though neither knew the other save in a covenant familiar through experience unrecorded and unrecordable whose terms were not of time and to which space was a child's puzzle.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Reason and faith, the Archbishop said, do not of necessity cohere. Reason saith that water will not be transformed to wine. Faith has a contrary answer.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“They did not understand him. Poor Dorothy had been long in the situation they seemed only to have arrived at, but she tried to tear the head off her doll and cried what sounded like Gog.
— There, you hear, her mother said. Clever girl, she crooned at her. Say God. Say sky.
— Koy.
— She has said her prayers, Kit said in weariness.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“I am what I am what am I. Forgive. They hit with a stone, a rock, my brain rocks.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Words often came to him thus, they were dealt by a ghost called the Muse. Since all cards are within your hands to shuffle or to cut. A clinching rhyme needed. Surest thing.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“The beauty was all within, behind the locked doors of the eyes.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“So I argue that a wife, being a free soul, cannot be accounted a possession.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Thought has killed millions and will yet kill more. Let us drown thought in another jug.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“If we'd but eat and drink
And swink and so to sleep
There'd be no time to think
And hence no tome to weep.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Doubts dissolve in knowledge that religious change has never been truly religious. Faith us corrupted by matters of state. Christians should be Christians, that and no more.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“I am drawn to my own sex, not to the other. I was born so.
-No man is born so. Male and female created he them. You have been perverted at some point in your life recoverable to memory.
-Not so. I am as I am. I can no more repent than I can change my skin or grow another finger.
-You say cannot, I say will not.
-If I say I repent, I lie. If I undertake to turn my face from it, this as I am told being a condition of forgiveness, then the undertaking is a lie.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Is all wate of the male seed equally heinous? Is mastrupation as evil a sin?
-Less so since it does not win others to sin, but souls resident in a man's seed in potentia that might at the last people God's Kingdom are thwarted, nay murdered by an unnatural act.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“- I have committed fornication.
- So have many, my son. With women married or unmarried>
-Never. With boys or with men. (Married. Unmarried. The rhotic weakness tried to strike a nerve, but the nerves would not stay still for the striking.)”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Wept? Why? At the comfortable cycle of life that smelt of bread and beef seething, round and round for ever if the preachers and governors would allow it, and he himself a tangent to the cycle. Wept at a future that, he knew, must be perilous. Wept because they, his womenfolk and his hammering father, would weep. Weep when? That he did not know. He could hear weeping on the wind.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“It lies not in our power to love, or hate,
For it will in us is overruled by fate.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“If you are a poet you may put together rhymes for me properly considered, not dealt by chance like two aces. What have you now in stock?...”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Some think that bread can be God and some that bread is bread and God is a hovering thought over it.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Does he not also tell some legend of a unity capriciously split by the gods, so that half goes wandering in search of half? But that is a pretty doctrine of male soul and female soul conjoined if they are lucky, which is rare, after an eternity of seeking. Male and female are grossly conjoined following nature's wish that they breed. There is an airier or more spiritual mode of conjunction.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“This is the nature of how humanity behaves. Blood is thicker than belief.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Ah well, he murmured in some sobriety, we are but the guests of life, we begin aghast and end a ghost.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“And then: Discretion is a great killer of God's truth or the devil's.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“They love the pain of others for in it their own power is made manifest. It is the one thing men want. Not knowledge, not virtue, but power.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Keep up with these disbursements, Jack, and you do no more than feed their greed.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“-How much is there in the writing of a play? Henslowe said:
-Work you mean, or money ? Kyd said:
-Too much work and too little money.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Clearly out if his wits. No longer as he had been, intermittently in his senses. Religion can do this to a man, nay to a whole nation can it.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“What is of important is that we have the Holy Word restored to us direct, not to ne filtered through the addled brains of the foul tribe of priests.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford

“Kit bowed to all in the manner of a single wave of obeisance and left the chamber in some anger and disquiet. Outside the door he saw Baines waiting for entrance. Kit spat and said: No buboes yet? The devils of the plague know their own. Baines said:
&emdash; That is not friendly.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford