Poor Things Quotes

“She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, 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

“Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Many lives and limbs have been lost, McCandless, by excluding women from the more intricate medical arts.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“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

“Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, 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.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“If medical practitioners wanted to save lives,” said Baxter, “instead of making money out of them, they would unite to prevent diseases, not work separately to cure them. The cause of most illness has been known since at least the sixth century before Christ, when the Greeks made a goddess of Hygiene. Sunlight, cleanliness and exercise, McCandless! Fresh air, pure water, a good diet and clean roomy houses for everyone, and a total government ban on all work which poisons and prevents these things.” “Impossible, Baxter. Britain has become the industrial workshop of the world. If social legislation arrests the profits of British industry our worldwide market will be collared by Germany and America and thousands would starve to death. Nearly a third of Britain’s food is imported from abroad.” “Exactly! So until we lose our worldwide market British medicine will be employed to keep a charitable mask on the face of a heartless plutocracy.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“If medical practitioners wanted to save lives,” said Baxter, “instead of making money out of them, they would unite to prevent diseases, not work separately to cure them.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“So your only hope is among the PACIFISTS or PEACEFUL ANARCHISTS. They say we can only improve the world by improving ourselves and hoping others copy us. This means not fighting anyone, giving away money and either living on the free gifts of others or on the work of our own hands. Buddha, Jesus, and Saint Francis took this path and in this century Prince Kropotkin, Count Leo Tolstoï and an American bachelor farmer-author called Thoreau. The movement attracts a lot of harmless aristocrats and writers. They annoy governments by refusing to pay taxes they think evil—which is most of them, since armies and weapons are what taxes mainly pay for. However, the police only imprison and flog ordinary Pacifists. The admirers of the famous ones keep them out of serious trouble. When you go into politics, Bell, be sure to become a Pacifist Anarchist. People will love you.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“That is why our arts and sciences cannot improve the world, despite what liberal philanthropists say. Our vast new scientific skills are first used by the damnably greedy selfish impatient parts of our nature and nation, the careful kindly social part always comes second.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“Numai religiile proaste sunt dependente de mistere, așa cum guvernele proaste depind de polițiile secrete - Goodwin Baxter”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“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

“does life mainly evolve through small gradual changes, or through big catastrophic ones?”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“The imagination is, like the appendix, inherited from a primitive epoch when it aided the survival of our species, but in modern scientific industrial nations it is mainly a source of disease.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“The public hospitals are places where doctors learn how to get money off the rich by practising on the poor. That is why poor people dread and hate them, and why those with a good income are operated upon privately, or in their own homes.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“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

“Are there no British natives?"
"In Wales, Ireland and Scotland perhaps. In England we still have a class of farmers, farm servants, estate workers et cetera, but the landowners and city dwellers regard them as useful animals, like horses and dogs.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“It is hard not to pity those whose powers separate them from all the rest of us, unless (of course) they are rulers doing the usual sort of damage.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“Very poor children learn to beg, lie and steal from their parents – they would hardly survive otherwise. Prosperous parents tell their children that nobody should lie, steal or kill, and that idleness and gambling are vices. They then send them to schools where they suffer if they do not disguise their thoughts and feelings and are taught to admire killers and stealers like Achilles and Ulysses, William the Conqueror and Henry the Eighth. This prepares them for life in a land where rich people use acts of parliament to deprive the poor of homes and livelihoods, where unearned incomes are increased by stock-exchange gambling, where those who own most property work least and amuse themselves by hunting, horse-racing and leading their country into battle.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“rich nations depend on infant mortalities”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“To improve the world, Bella, you need only build a high mountain between every town and its nearest neighbour, or chop the continents into many islands of equal size.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“Everyone should have a cosy shell around them, a good coat with money in the pockets. I must be a Socialist.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things