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Poor Things QUOTES

Poor Things QUOTES

1 " You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

2 " 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 , Poor Things

3 " 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 , Poor Things

4 " Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

5 " 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 , Poor Things

6 " 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 , Poor Things

7 " 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 , Poor Things

8 " 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 , Poor Things

9 " She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

10 " Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police."
A character's response to a discussion about eating from the tree of knowledge. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

11 " Dear God I am tired. It is late. Writing like Shakespeare is hard work for a woman with a cracked head who cannot spell properly. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

12 " Numai religiile proaste sunt dependente de mistere, așa cum guvernele proaste depind de polițiile secrete - Goodwin Baxter "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

13 " She is the swelling sail, trim rigging and bust sunlit deck of our matrimonial yacht. I am the low hull, with the invisible ballast and keel. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

14 " I read the miserable story of the play in which she was the one true loving soul. It obviously described the spread of an epidemic brain fever which, like typhoid, was perhaps caused by seepings from the palace graveyard into the Elsinore water supply. From an inconspicuous start among sentries on the battlements the infection spread through prince, king, prime minister and courtiers causing hallucinations, logomania and paranoia resulting in insane suspicions and murderous impulses. I imagined myself entering the palace quite early in the drama with all the executive powers of an efficient public health officer. The main carriers of the disease (Claudius, Polonius and the obviously incurable Hamlet) would he quarantined in separate wards. A fresh water supply and efficient modern plumbing would soon set the Danish state right and Ophelia, seeing this gruff Scottish doctor pointing her people toward a clean and healthy future, would be powerless to withhold her love. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

15 " Morbid anatomy is essential to training and research, but leads many doctors into thinking that life is an agitation in something essentially dead. They treat patients' bodies as if the minds, the lives, were of no account. The smooth bedside manner we cultivate is seldom more than a cheap anaesthetic to make our patients as passive as the corpses we train upon. But a portrait painter does not learn his art by scraping layers of varnish from a Rembrandt, then slicing off the impasto, dissolving the ground and finally separating the fibres of the canvas. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

16 " I tried to scream like you once screamed God since I wanted to make the whole world faint but Harry Astley clapped his hand over my mouth O the sheer joy of feeling my teeth sink in. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

17 " Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty, and goodness are not mysterious, they are the comments, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air, and bread. Only folk whose heads are muddled by expensive educations think truth, beauty, goodness are rare private properties. Nature is more liberal. The universe keeps nothing essential from us--it is all present, all gift. God is the universe plus mind. Those who say God, or the universe, or nature is mysterious, are like those who call these things jealous or angry. They are announcing the state of their lonely, muddled minds. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things

18 " In m second year I attended a public debate on a theme that interested me, though not by its novelty: does life mainly evolve through small gradual changes, or through big catastrophic ones? In those days that theme was supposed to be religious as well as scientific, so the principle speakers swerved from fanatical solemnity to facetious jocularity, and changed the ground of their argument whenever it gave them the slightest advantage over their opponents. "

― Alasdair Gray , Poor Things