There is the devastatingly simple, yet profound, moral dilemma, which underlies the book: is it better for a man to choose to be bad than to be conditioned to be good?
Violence makes violence.
They were like waking up to what was being done to their malenky persons and saying that they wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast. They looked like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and were all bruised and pouty. Well, if they would not go to school they must have there education. And education they had had.
Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.
Shined, combed, brushed and gorgeous.
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.
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?
The human liver, unless it is Graham Greene’s, can take so much and no more.
It is not the novelist’s job to preach; it is his duty to show.
History is a wheel. This sort of world can’t go on for ever either.
Perhaps the ultimate act of evil is dehumanization, the killing of the soul.
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?
A flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.
So we got hold of him and cracked him with a few good horrorshow tolchocks, but he still went on singing.
The danger of memory is that it can turn anyone into a prophet.
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.
Oh, I’m dying,′ I like moaned. ‘Oh, I have a ghastly pain in my side. Appendicitis, it is. Ooooooh.’ ‘Appendy shitehouse,’ grumbled this veck.
That was everything. I’d done the lot now. And me still only fifteen.
Then there was another picture of some veck I thought I knew, and it was this Minister of the Inferior or Interior.
But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.