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 am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia–by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best.(tr Jowett)
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Plato
Eyes blinded by the fog of thingscannot see truth. Ears deafened by the din of thingscannot hear truth. Brains bewildered by the whirl of thingscannot think truth. Hearts deadened by the weight of thingscannot feel truth. Throats choked by the dust of thingscannot speak truth.
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Harold Bell Wright
There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don't understand what quality in a mind is yet, even though we might someday....
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Jaron Lanier
It is better to seek spirituality than materialism.
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Lailah Gifty Akita
The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he...
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Thomas Mann
More Quotes By Alasdair Gray
You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable.
Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her. Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it.
...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.
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.
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.
