Quotes for All
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
Glasgow is still full of churches built in the last century. Half of them have been turned into warehouses. Alasdair Gray
She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it. Alasdair Gray
But I do enjoy words—some words for their own sake! Words like river, and dawn, and daylight, and time. These words seem much richer than our experiences of the things they represent— Alasdair Gray
Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels. Alasdair Gray
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. … Read more
Are there many people without illness or disability who sit at home in the evening with clenched fists, continually changing the channel of a television set and wishing they had the courage to roll over the parapet of a high bridge? I bet there are millions of us. Alasdair Gray
I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart. Alasdair Gray
I ought to have more love before I die. I’ve not had enough. Alasdair Gray
A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand … Read more