“He walked down the side street to a wide thoroughfare of shop-windows and offices. This, he assumed, was one of the main arteries of London, a city he did not know very well. There were sodium street-lights, lights in windows. Occasional cars sped by. There was even an airline bus crammed with yawning passengers. Edwin saw himself reflected in a window full of tape-recorders.”

—  Anthony Burgess

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "He walked down the side street to a wide thoroughfare of shop-windows and offices. This, he assumed, was one of the mai…" by Anthony Burgess?
Anthony Burgess photo
Anthony Burgess 297
English writer 1917–1993

Related quotes

“He wrote stories about everything he saw, and he saw a lot. He walked through the streets of Brooklyn along the water, or leaned against the store windows on Livingston Street watching people hurrying along, making up stories about this one or that one.”

Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer

Source: Water Street (2006), Prologue, p. 3

Ayn Rand photo

“He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

The Fountainhead (1943).
Source: Atlas Shrugged
Context: That particular sense of sacred rapture men say they experience in contemplating nature- I've never received it from nature, only from. Buildings, Skyscrapers. I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pest-hole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.

Imre Kertész photo

“Nothing upsets me as much as a shop window jammed full of objects; such windows literally depress, sadden, even demoralize me.”

Imre Kertész book Kaddish for an Unborn Child

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

Morton Feldman photo

“My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue.... He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, "What about the man on the street?"”

Morton Feldman (1926–1987) American avant-garde composer

At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street.
Quoted in in "AMERICAN SUBLIME : Morton Feldman's mysterious musical landscapes", by Alex Ross. in The New Yorker (19 June 2006)

Henry James photo

“He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

"Nathaniel Hawthorne" in Library of the World's Best Literature, vol. XII (1897), ed. Charles Dudley Warner.

“On the one hand, the great focal points and the main arteries of traffic speak of the dignity of government and the easy movement of commerce. But we need also the more intimate side of city planning, the by ways with their little shops, the occasional drinking fountain at a street corner, the glimpse of some secluded garden through a half-open gate.”

Clarence Stein (1882–1975) American architect

A Triumph of Spanish Colonial Style (1916)

Nicholas Sparks photo

“I call it God Light, because it reminds me of heaven. Every time the light shines through the window we built or any window at all, you'll know I'm right there with you, okay? That's going to be me. I'll be the light in the window.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Last Song

Source: The Last Song

“In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit.”

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) British novelist and art historian.

Making Things Better (2002)

Brian W. Aldiss photo

“The house was a rambling affair. It had few windows, and such as there were did not open, were unbreakable and admitted no light.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Outside

Outside (1955)
Context: The house was a rambling affair. It had few windows, and such as there were did not open, were unbreakable and admitted no light. Darkness lay everywhere; illumination from an invisible source followed one's entry into a room — the black had to be entered before it faded. Every room was furnished, but with odd pieces that bore little relation to each other, as if there was no purpose for the room. Rooms equipped for purposeless beings have that air about them.

James Dickey photo

“I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.”

James Dickey (1923–1997) American writer

The Hospital Window (l. 1–4).
The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

Related topics