Alasdair Gray Quotes

He looked at them and saw their faces did not fit. The skin on the skulls crawled and twitched like half-solid paste. All the heads in his angle of vision seemed irregular lumps, like potatoes but without a potato’s repose: potatoes with crawling surfaces punctured by holes which opened and shut, holes blocked with coloured jelly or fringed with bone stumps, elastic holes through which air was sucked or squirted, holes secreting salt, wax, spittle and snot. He grasped a pencil in his trouser pocket, wishing it were a knife he could thrust through his cheek and use to carve his face down to the clean bone. But that was foolish. Nothing clean lay under the face. He thought of sectioned brains, palettes, eyeballs and ears seen in medical diagrams and butcher’s shops. He thought of elastic muscle, pulsing tubes, gland sacks full of lukewarm fluid, the layers of cellular and fibrous and granular tissues inside a head. What was felt as tastes, caresses, dreams and thoughts could be seen as a cleverly articulated mass of garbage.
Alasdair Gray
I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do.
Alasdair Gray
The body of the last Flealouse contained the flesh of everything that had ever lived. It was content.
Alasdair Gray
I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it.
Alasdair Gray
Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them.
Alasdair Gray
People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people
Alasdair Gray
Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here…think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.
Alasdair Gray
Who did the council fight?""It split in two and fought itself.""That's suicide!""No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.""I refuse to believe men kill each other just to make their enemies rich.""How can men recognize their real enemies when their family, schools and work teach them to struggle with each other and to believe law and decency come from the teachers?""My son won't be taught that," said Lanark firmly."You have a son?""Not yet.
Alasdair Gray
Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.
Alasdair Gray
Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
Alasdair Gray
Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having.
Alasdair Gray
Metaforen är ett av tankens väsentligaste verktyg. Den belyser vad som annars skulle ligga helt i mörker. Men denna belysning blir ibland så klar att den bländar istället för avslöjar.
Alasdair Gray
One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.
Alasdair Gray
...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.
Alasdair Gray
Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her.Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it.
Alasdair Gray
You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable.
Alasdair Gray