Yquotes.com

 

Tertiary syphilis, as my readers will not need reminding perhaps, comes, when it comes at all, about ten years after the initial infection. About two thirds of syphilitics miss it, especially if they are women or coloured. It is believed, though without solid evidence, that it attacks the sedentary more than the active. This means that writers and composers, granted that primary lesion, are prone to it.

 

Anthony Burgess

» Anthony Burgess - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

Dr Williams’s book is about a number of nineteenth-century French writers who caught syphilis and probably died of paresis. They are Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Daudet. A similar book could probably be written about nineteenth-century British writers, including such unlikely victims of syphilis as John Keats and Edward Lear. People were not so frightened of the disease as we are. Few physicians saw the connection between cerebral degeneration and the primary chancre: when the secondary stage of the infection had healed, it was generally assumed that everything was over and lightning would not strike the tree again. This was Baudelaire’s belief. One could even rejoice at picking up the pox: it was not merely an inoculation; it advertised one’s virility to the world....

 

Anthony Burgess

 

I'm also lumbered with the title of being a writer's writer, which is the worst possible reputation you can have, because, of course, other writers don't read other writers except to gain evidence against them. And it puts readers off.

 

John Banville

 

This little Collection differs, it is believed, from others in the attempt made to include in it all the best original lyrical pieces and songs in our language, by writers not living, and none besides the best. The Editor will regard as his fittest readers those who love poetry so well, that he can offer them nothing not already known and valued.

 

Francis Turner Palgrave

 

Matthew says, that the angel that was sitting upon the stone on the outside of the sepulchre told the two Marys that Christ was risen, and that the women went away quickly. Mark says, that the women, upon seeing the stone rolled away, and wondering at it, went into the sepulchre, and that it was the angel that was sitting within on the right side, that told them so. Luke says, it was the two angels that were standing up; and John says, it was Jesus Christ himself that told it to Mary Magdalene; and that she did not go into the sepulchre, but only stooped down and looked in.
Now, if the writers of these four books had gone into a court of justice to prove an alibi, (for it is of the nature of an alibi that is here attempted to be proved, namely, the absence of a dead body by supernatural means,) and had they given their evidence in the same contradictory manner as it is here given, they would have been in danger of having their ears cropt for perjury, and would have justly deserved it. Yet this is the evidence, and these are the books, that have been imposed upon the world as being given by divine inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God.

 

Jesus Christ

 

How can I call security a woman's primary fantasy if I am saying it is also her primary need? Because while her primary need is the security of a home and a family circle, her primary fantasy is that someone else will earn enough to pay for them. Hence the focus of 2 billion women on the latest royal wedding.

 

Warren Farrell