Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

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.

But I am a very romantic woman who needs a lot of sex but not from you because you cannot help treating me like a child, and I cannot CAN NOT treat you like one. I am marrying Candle because I can treat him how I like.”

On our boat up the Nile a fine lady travelled alone and someone told me she was a woman with a past, O how I envied her.

I read Genesis three years ago and could not understand God’s displeasure when Eve and Adam chose to know good and evil—chose to be Godlike. That should have been his proudest hour.”

Love (Wedder thinks) only deserves the name when men insert their middle footless leg.

said Russia is as young a country as the U.S.A. because a nation is only as old as its literature.

“What are Socialists, Duncan?” I asked. “Fools who think the world should be improved.”

Maybe an increase in the size and number of boys’ boarding-schools has bred up a professional class who are strangers to female reality.

1st August, 1914.

Birthday!!