"Burmese Days" Quotes

How can you ever stay stagnant, when there’s so much evil in the world that you could work to reduce?

Contemptuous in his goodfortune and civilisation.

For the rest nothing mattered beside one fact: the tyranny, the filth, the anonymous persecution that went on all around them.

He hated the heat and the sweat breaking out on the back of his shirt, the drowsy silence of the garden. Above all, he hated his own impotence.

Drink, work for one’s health as they called it, was an object of loathing to him.

There is only one hour in the day when a white man can get on without the risk of meeting a native, and that hour is sacred to tennis.

The real corruption of India lay not in their poverty, but in their climate.

It was not even pretended that Bridge, at twentyone luncheons a week, was necessary in order to earn one's living.

It is the time, it is the democratic era! The tyranny is done away with forever!

In that moment I felt suffocated by the atmosphere of lies and hypocrisy.