Glasgow Quotes

Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it. ~ Ellen Glasgow

In August 1867, a thirteen-year-old142 boy who had severely cut his arm while operating a machine at a fair in Glasgow was admitted to Lister's infirmary. The boy's wound was open and smeared with grime - a setup for gangrene. But rather than amputating the arm, Lister tried a salve of carbolic acid, hoping to keep the arm alive and uninfected. The wound teetered on the edge of a terrifying infection, threatening to become an abscess. But Lister persisted, intensifying his application of carbolic acid paste. For a few weeks, the whole effort seemed hopeless. But then, like a fire running to the end of a rope, the wound began to dry up. A month later, when the poultices were removed, the skin had completely healed underneath. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I have watchedmany literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop ... Yet with the many that I have seen comeand go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture. ~ Ellen Glasgow

OUT. CUT IT ALL OUT. Cut out my father. Cut out my mother. Cut out missing Ellis. Cut out the man in the underpass, cut out Fucking Frank, the men downstairs; the people on the street with too many people inside them, cut out hungry, and sad and tired, and being nobody and unpretty and unloved, just cut it all out, get smaller and smaller until I was nothing. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Glasgow is an incredibly creative and culturally vibrant place. ~ Ruta Gedmintas

For my own purpose, I defined the art of fiction as experience illuminated. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Jamaica was the Ophir of the West of Scotland in those times. Upon its sugar fields and by the agency of its slave labour, Glasgow slowly emerged from its primeval state of small borough town, to be a business centre, rivalling and soon surpassing Bristol in its West India trade. ~ R.B. Cunninghame Graham

When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release? ~ Ellen Glasgow

From his vantage point in Ruchill Park, Laidlaw looked out over the city. He could see so much of it from here and still it baffled him. 'What is this place?' he thought.

A small and great city, his mind answered. A city with its face against the wind. That made it grimace. But did it have to be so hard? Sometimes it felt so hard…It was a place so kind it would batter cruelty into the ground. And what circumstances kept giving it was cruelty. No wonder he loved it. It danced among its own debris. When Glasgow gave up, the world could call it a day. ~ William McIlvanney

The age is a vociferous one, and no prophet is without honor who is able to strike an attitude and to speak loud enough to make himself heard. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Nothing, except the weather report or a general maxim of conduct, is so unsafe to rely upon as a theory of fiction. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Life is never what one dreams. It is seldom what one desires, but for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibility of high adventure. ~ Ellen Glasgow

She's not a cookie, or a book, or a record on a shelf. You can't just play with her and then put her back. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

My father had been from Glasgow; my mother, from Los Angeles. They had both enjoyed the quip that the difference between an American and a European was that to an American, a hundred years was a long time, and to a European, a hundred miles is a big journey. ~ Mercedes Lackey

The Scots are a very tough people. They have drive-by headbuttings. In Glasgow a sweatband is considered a silencer. ~ Emo Philips

For me, the novel is experience illumined by imagination ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

I was training to be a lawyer ... I was president of the law society at Glasgow University, and my bass guitarist was my secretary of my law society; the lead guitarist and writer worked at the law firm that I worked. ~ Gerard Butler

My granny would come out and stay with us in the winter, and we would listen to the reports from the coastal stations and have a discussion in the middle of Glasgow about what the weather was like in Tiree. ~ Johann Lamont

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design. ~ Ellen Glasgow

There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Sometimes you're so hungry, so thirsty for something to fill you up, you've craved it for so long, but when you finally have it, it hurts going down. It's not a medicine for what ails you. It might just be the thing that is keeping you sick. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

It is only by knowing how little life has in store for us that we are able to look on the bright side and avoid disappointment. ~ Ellen Glasgow

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of ... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The suitable is the last thing we ever want. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I'm not going to throw away the hand of friendship to suit 100 Trotskyites in Glasgow. ~ Billy Connolly

Mickey holds up the soggy paper. DIE. Don't you die. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity. ~ Ellen Glasgow

There was a silence and then Alice, the oldest person in the room, cleared her throat. Alice has watery eyes and fluffy white hair and favors sweatpants and sweatshirts with glittery stars and flowers. Alice lost her mother when she was ten. That is a whole lifetime without a mother, to get used to not having a mother, and yet here she is. All these years later. Still grieving.

Alice said, "Write me a letter telling me how to live for the rest of my life without you." She paused.

"That was sixty-four years ago, and I still would like to know."

I'm writing this down because someday I will be Alice, with a whole lifetime spent without a mother, a lifetime of walking around with a Grand Canyon of grief in my heart, and people should know what that feels like. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

A guy is walking along the road in Glasgow and sees a man with a humungous great dog on the other side of the street. He goes over and says, 'Hey, Jimmy, dis yer dawg byte?'

The man says, 'Nu.'

So the guy pats the dog on the head, whereupon the dog snaps, and bites off a couple of fingers. 'Grrrwrwrwrwrrfraarrrrrgggggklle...umph.'

The guy screams 'Aaaghgee' as blood streams from his hand, and shouts, 'A tawt yer said yer dawg dusna byte.'

The man says quietly with a look of calm diffidence, 'Sna ma dawg. ~ Harry W. Kroto

It is a though he is spreading a veil of protectiveness over me, and I am greedy for it. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

It's sort of like that poem: I thought I was done with death, at least a little bit, but death wasn't done with me. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Theories have nothing to do with life ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

I am from a city (Glasgow) that is not unlike Liverpool. I am joining the people's football club. The majority of people you meet on the street are Everton fans. It is a fantastic opportunity, something you dream about. I said 'yes' right away as it is such a big club. ~ David Moyes

I have been very fortunate to be able to work and get the opportunity to play different roles. It's nice to do big studio pictures and then work in Glasgow on films like 'Red Road' and then dress up as a vampire or an alien. I think that's why a lot of people are actors - the versatility. ~ Tony Curran

No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The Glasgow accent was so strong you could have built a bridge with it and known it would outlast the civilization that spawned it ~ Val McDermid

When Barlinnie's Prison doctor, Dr Danson, came to see Dingus, he turned in disgust at the state Dingus was left to lie in. Doctor Danson refused to treat him as he knew Dingus's injuries were life threatening, he told the top warden that Dingus would need to be rushed to Glasgow Royal Infirmary for emergency surgery. The screws in the seg block refused to listen to the doctor, they pushed and manhandled their own doctor out of Dingus's cell and threatened him with a severe beating if he made anything public about Dingus's injuries. ~ Stephen Richards

What is a "canty day", Dennis?'
'I've never troubled to ask. Something like hogmanay, I expect.'
'What is that?'
'People being sick on the pavement in Glasgow.'
'Oh. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I was in the ensemble and also covered the parts of Dee Dee and Mary!! I had a fantastic time doing this show especially when we performed in places like Cardiff and Glasgow where the audiences were just so enthusiastic, joining in with all the songs and up on their feet dancing at the end!! ~ Francesca Jackson

A search through Whistler's correspondence, now online at the University of Glasgow, paints a portrait of a relationship that at times was volatile, with Sickert swinging from sycophantic to offended and defensive. Whistler's ~ Patricia Cornwell

Don't let the cereal eat you. It's only a fucking box of cereal, but it will eat you alive if you let it. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success. ~ Ellen Glasgow

...I'm in a little bubble of warmth, just like I had with Ellis, a place I never thought I'd be again. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

But youth isn't happy. Youth is sadder than age. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The old alone have finality. What is true of the young today may be false tomorrow. They are enveloped in emotion; and emotion as a state of being is fluent and evanescent. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Glasgow was home-made ginger biscuits and Jennifer Lawson dead in the park. It was the sententious niceness of the Commander and the threatened abrasiveness of Laidlaw. It was Milligan, insensitive as a mobile slab of cement, and Mrs Lawson, witless with hurt. It was the right hand knocking you down and the left hand picking you up, while the mouth alternated apology and threat. ~ William McIlvanney

It's very important for cities all around the world to reinvent themselves, and Glasgow is a good example of that. The Scots are very nice. I don't think they are burdened by their history. ~ Zaha Hadid

I'm scared."
"Don't be. I promise you there's nothing to be scared of from me. This is the real fucking deal and I'm going to protect it with everything I have. Just say you're with me."
"I live in Glasgow," I reiterated, hanging on by a thread.
"Forget that. Forget everything but you and me and right now. I don't care if that's reckless or stupid… I just… Just give yourself over to this with me and I honestly believe it will all work itself out. Will you do that? Will you just hold on with me?"
I stared into his face, a face that felt so strangely familiar to me now. My fears rode me but I knew as the warmth and excitement and thrill and peace exploded through me in opposing harmony that he was going to win over my fears.
I nodded, my hands tightening in his. "I'll hold on. ~ Samantha Young

My second play, Yellow Fever, which came out at the Repertory Theatre a few months later was produced by Lewis Casson, the husband of Sybil Thorndyke, who was at that time the producer of the old Repertory Theatre in Glasgow. He is an extraordinarily interesting man, quite apart from the theatre. I believe he invented the first poison gas projector to be used on the Somme. ~ Dot Allan

I had entered the Green [of Glasgow] by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street - had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking upon the engine at the time, and had gone as far as the herd's house, when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder. I then saw that I must get rid of the condensed steam and injection water if I used a jet, as in Newcomen's engine. Two ways of doing this occurred to me. First, the water might be run off by a descending pipe, if an outlet could be got at the depth of 35 or 36 feet, and any air might be extracted by a small pump. The second was to make the pump large enough to extract both water and air. ... I had not walked further than the Golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.

{In Robert Hart's words, a recollection of the description of Watt's moment of inspiration, in May 1765, for improving Thomas Newcomen's steam engine.} ~ James Watt

Charlie Davis finds her voice, and her solace, in drawing. I find mine in writing. What's your solace? Do you know? Find it and don't stop doing it, ever. Find your people (because you need to talk), your tribe, your reason to be, and I swear to you, the other side will emerge, slowly but surely. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I've liked life well enough, but I reckon I'll like death even better as soon as I've gotten used to the feel of it ... I shouldn't be amazed to find it less lonely than life after I'm once safely settled. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I went to the Glasgow Youth Theatre and they just let me in. But I was so shy that I was there for about six weeks without actually introducing myself. ~ Bill Forsyth

In the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language. ~ Ellen Glasgow

It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Riley's sway as he disappeared down the alley, I recognized it. It wasn't booze. It was the thing that happened when a little too much got a little too messed up. They sway, it's what creeps over a person when they've begun to empty out and don't care enough to put anything back, to replace what has been lost. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it. ~ Ellen Glasgow

This whole place is a world of sobbing girls. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I think that practising the law, particularly litigation, and particularly in Glasgow, has always been difficult enough without adding to it by having problems with professional colleagues or former colleagues. ~ Len G. Murray

The ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I'd live in Glasgow if I could. I can't praise it enough; it's the nicest place I have ever worked and I've worked in a lot of nice places. ~ Roxanne McKee

But the fucked-up part is once you start self-harming, you can never not be a creepy freak, because your whole body is now a scarred and charred battlefield and nobody likes that on a girl, nobody will love that, and so all of us, every one, is screwed, inside and out. Wash, rinse, fucking repeat. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

If you went for a job interview in a Glasgow law firm, they used to ask you what school you went to. And that was a way of finding out what religion you were. ~ Denise Mina

What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Cutting is a fence you build upon your own body to keep people out but then you cry to be touched. But the fence is barbed. What then? ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Why do we like being Irish? Partly because
It gives us a hold on the sentimental English
As members of a world that never was,
Baptised with fairy water;
And partly because Ireland is small enough
To be still thought of with a family feeling,
And because the waves are rough
That split her from a more commercial culture;
And because one feels that here at least one can
Do local work which is not at the world's mercy
And that on this tiny stage with luck a man
Might see the end of one particular action.
It is self-deception of course;
There is no immunity in this island either;
A cart that is drawn by somebody else's horse
And carrying goods to somebody else's market.
The bombs in the turnip sack, the sniper from the roof,
Griffith, Connolly, Collins, where have they brought us?
Ourselves alone! Let the round tower stand aloof
In a world of bursting mortar!
Let the school-children fumble their sums
In a half-dead language;
Let the censor be busy on the books; pull down the
Georgian slums;
Let the games be played in Gaelic.
Let them grow beet-sugar; let them build
A factory in every hamlet;
Let them pigeon-hole the souls of the killed
Into sheep and goats, patriots and traitors.
And the North, where I was a boy,
Is still the North, veneered with the grime of Glasgow,
Thousands of men whom nobody will employ
Standing at t ~ Louis MacNeice

1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side; but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable. ~ Ellen Glasgow

What's really important is the essence of the life lived. A college degree isn't going to tell me how well somebody lived, now is it? Does having a boat mean you lived a good life? Or a summerhouse? What about saving each valentine your son made or even working a roadside jam stand? A million, what do they call it? - selfies - on some silly website. What does it all mean, in the end? ~ Kathleen Glasgow

She said,"Don't be scared, little one. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Dear Ellis, I have something really fucking angelic to tell you. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

A girl's life is the worst life in the world. A girl's life is: you are born, you bleed, you burn. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Cynicism is a sure sign of youth. ~ Ellen Glasgow

defiant, and her words have rough, girlish hope. The ~ Kathleen Glasgow

For me, Glasgow is all about the people and the spirit of the place. You have enough Gregg's bakers, though, I'll say that. The opening of the 1977 'Star Wars' movie was possibly the only time I've seen a longer queue round the block than in Glasgow for sausage rolls. That was quite an eye-opener. ~ Darren Boyd

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Lunacy, like the rain, falls upon the evil and the good, and although it must forever remain a fearful misfortune, yet there may be no more sin or shame in it than there is in an ague fit or a fever. ~ Inmate Of The Glasgow Royal Asylum

After he died, my mother was like a crab: she tucked everything inside and left only her shell. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

You could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Yes, I learned long ago that the only satisfaction of authorship lies in finding the very few who understand what we mean. As for outside rewards, there is not one that I have ever discovered. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living. ~ Ellen Glasgow

One of the attributes Glasgow is best known for all over the world is the friendliness of her people. ~ Nicola Sturgeon

My mum always said you get more fun at a Glasgow stabbing than an Edinburgh wedding. ~ Caro Ramsay

Give the young half a chance and they will create their own future, they will even create their own heaven and earth. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Many of the men who had come to the wilderness to practice religion appeared to have forgotten its true nature. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I'm no stranger to fucking up. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Those unexpected morality lessons provided by the trip had jolted me into some kind of action. It was time to jettison the past before the present jettisoned me. This was my first veiled attempt at recovery. Although perhaps I was just running away again. I returned to Glasgow, planning to say a final goodbye to Anne and get out of her life, but ended up drinking with buddies in the Chip Bar and never seeing her. I called her instead to say I was moving to London and told her she could have the house and everything else we owned, which wasn't much. I think she was as relieved as I was that I was leaving town for good. ~ Craig Ferguson

For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction. ~ Tom Stoppard

They make me...they make me think of being stuck somewhere? I don't know, like weighted down, but then these patches... ~ Kathleen Glasgow

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature ... I would write of characters, not of characteristics. ~ Ellen Glasgow

But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad. ~ Ellen Glasgow

It is good for a man to do right, and to leave happiness to take care of itself ... ~ Ellen Glasgow

Anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting. ~ Ellen Glasgow

Though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror. ~ Ellen Glasgow

I hated the things they believe in, the things they so innocently and charmingly pretended. I hated the sanctimonious piety that let people hurt helpless creatures. I hated the prayers and the hymns - the fountains and the red images that coloured their drab music, the fountains filled with blood, the sacrifice of the lamb. ~ Ellen Glasgow