# Quote — Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers

> Carlo looked as at the world of fallen man on the endless suburbs that passed for a city, an eatery in the likeness of a Sphinx (enter between its forepaws), another, for jumbo malts so thick you can't suck 'em through a straw, in the form of an elephant crouched as at the bidding of its mahout, gimcrack temples of various faiths, attap roofs of nutburger stands with Corinthian columns, loans loans loans, stores crammed with cutprice radios, a doughnuttery, homes like Swiss chalets, like Bavarian castles, miniature Blenheims, Strawberry Hills, Taj Mahals, a bank in the form of a tiny ocean liner, dusty trees on the boulevards (datepalm, orange, oleander), bars with neon bottles endlessly pouring, colleges for stuntmen, beauticians, morticians, degrees in drummajoretteship.

- Author: [Anthony Burgess](https://www.leafyquotes.com/anthony-burgess.md)
- Book: [Earthly Powers](https://www.leafyquotes.com/anthony-burgess/earthly-powers.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess#Earthly_Powers_(1980)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/anthony-burgess/earthly-powers/carlo-looked-as-at-the

## More from this book

> ...Carlo delivered what began as a panegyric and ended as an anathema....His brother...regarded by the stupid and the wicked as a sort of imbecilic weakness, an infantile inability to come to terms with the sophisticated world of affairs. Because he was just he was to be seen as a quixotic madman, because he was virtuous he was to be taken for a eunuch, because he was magnanimous he was to be gulled and derided.... ‘There are many here today in this great modern temple of the Lord who have come not out of the piety of friendship or respect but following sickening forms of hypocritical convention, and among these are some that are soiled, bemerded, stinking with wealth amassed unjustly, wealth made out of torture and murder and the exploitation of human frailty, a precarious wealth as insubstantial as fairy gold, demon gold rather, that will crumble into dust at the dawn of the recovery of sanity and virtue by a great nation temporarily demented, an angelic land to its immigrants that is now set upon by the devils of greed, stupidity and madness...’

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/anthony-burgess/earthly-powers/carlo-delivered-what.md)

> It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/anthony-burgess/earthly-powers/it-was-the.md)

> Grimaldi and a sixteen-year-old girl still at Hollywood High. He was a good journalist but he was going to die soon. At fifty he was on a bottle and a half of Californian brandy a day and four packs of Lucky Strike. His clothes smelt as though they were seeped in tobacco juice. His white forlock was stained with it...

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/anthony-burgess/earthly-powers/grimaldi-and-a-sixteen-year-old.md)