I have heard earnest American sociologists say that American children have a right to the divorce experience as an enriching element of an advanced civilisation.
The state is never so efficient as when it wants money.
Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room.
The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.
Books in a large university library system: 2,000,000. Books in an average large city library: 10,000. Average number of books in a chain bookstore: 30,000. Books in an average neighborhood branch library: 20,000.
A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show – full of potential but temporarily inactive.
That’s the law, son. But you were never much of a one for following the law.
The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence – the act of love, for instance; music, for instance. You must take your chance, boy. The choice has been all yours.
I kept pushing the old noga through the floorboards near, and the Durango 95 ate up the road like spaghetti.
You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn’t care.
Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining’s? Or from Jackson’s in Piccadilly?
You were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God. That sort of thing could sap all the strength and the goodness out of a chelloveck.
There was no trust anywhere in the world, O my brothers, the way I could see it.
Then there was like quiet and we were full of like hate, so smashed what was left to be smashed.
It may not be nice to be good, 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
Well, everything’s a lesson, isn’t it? Learning all the time, as you could say.
Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE – and I said: ‘That’s a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?’ Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high preaching goloss: ‘ – The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen –.
Go on, do me in, you bastard cowards, I don’t want to live anyway, not in a stinking world like this one.′ I told Dim to lay off a bit then, because it used to interest me sometimes to slooshy what some of these starry decreps had to say about life and the world. I said: ‘Oh. And what’s stinking about it?
In a dead white field an untethered goat gave them sardonic greeting.
Of course it was horrible,′ smiled Dr. Branom. ‘Violence is a very horrible thing. That’s what you’re learning now. Your body is learning it.