Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

does life mainly evolve through small gradual changes, or through big catastrophic ones?

“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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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

a nation is only as old as its literature.

“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.”

But when we got children of our own I discovered most younger people are happily unfeeling toward parents and guardians they feel confident with.