Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Anthony BurgessRead
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.
Interpretation
This quote introduces a character and his friends engaging in thoughtful deliberation about their plans for the evening.
In this opening line from Anthony Burgess's 'A Clockwork Orange', the character Alex presents himself and his companions, known as 'droogs'. The setting in the 'Korova Milkbar' suggests a place of social gathering where they ponder their choices for the evening, reflecting on themes of friendship, youth rebellion, and the moral implications of their decisions.
In practice
This quote can be used to open a discussion about youth culture and choices in modern society.
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.
Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.
You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise Bog! I'm cured!
It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321.
People who are obsessed with Jesus live lives that connect them with the poor in some way or another. Obsessed people believe that Jesus talked about money and the poor so often because it was really important to Him.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus--more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.
When people get rich, they cut themselves off from the context that has earned them these riches - the context of the common men. They forget they are part of society.
If I were a Roman Catholic, I should turn a heretic, in sheer desperation, because I would rather go to heaven than go to purgatory.
Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.
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