Anthony Burgess Quotes

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.

A flower doesn't love you or hate you, it just exists.

Nature doesn't care what we call it, she just keeps on doing it any way she wants.

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.

They constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect That no one will need to be good.

Let it judge that nothing is either bad or good which can happen equally to the bad man and the good. For that which happens equally to him who lives contrary to nature and to him who lives according to nature, is neither according to nature nor contrary to nature.

It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is

I live for now, not for what happens after I die. I'm going to hell, not heaven. The devil has all the good gear. What's God got? The Inspiral Carpets and nuns.

The sun cares nothing for illumination.

Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.

may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living

A bird is joy incarnate.

You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned

O how blessed it would be never to marry, or grow old; but to spend one's life innocently and indifferently among the trees and rivers which alone can keep one cool and childlike in the midst of the troubles of the world!

May my heart always be open to little birds, who are the secrets of living. Whatever they sing is better than to know. And if men should not hear them - then men are old.

But who is innocent? By grace divine, Not otherwise,O Nature! we are thine.

I wish we had all been born birds instead.

Celebration is without any cause. Celebration is simply because we are. We are made out of the stuff called celebration.That's our natural state - to celebrate - as natural as it is for the trees to bloom, for birds to sing, for rivers to flow to the ocean. Celebration is a natural state.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

Oh, the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west.

The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.

All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.

I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free... Why am I so changed? I'm sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.

I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.