Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)
Kontext: I asked the headmaster of literature, "Why are there so many headmasters and so few poets? Is it easier for you to train your own kind than ours?" He said, "No. The emperor needs all the headmasters he can get. If a quarter of his people were headmasters he would be perfectly happy. But more than two poets would tear his kingdom apart."
"Five Letters from an Eastern Empire", p. 88.
Alasdair Gray: Zitate auf Englisch
“Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.”
Frontispiece Variants on this epigraph appear in other books by Alasdair Gray; one of them, "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation", is now engraved on a wall of the Scottish Parliament building. http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/holyrood/faq/answers/art006.htm They are all loose paraphrases of a couplet from Dennis Lee's "Civil Elegies": And best of all is finding a place to be in the early days of a better civilization. http://election.theherald.co.uk/homepage/electionnews/display.var.1370748.0.canadians_should_look_out_for_scottish_election.php Gray later devised a more distinct variant of this, because he believed the "nation" version should be credited to Lee: Work as if you live in the early days of a better world. As quoted in "Early Days of a Better Nation" by Harry Mcgrath, in Scottish Review of Books (28 March 2013) https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/03/early-days-of-a-better-nation/
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)
“She also said the wicked people needed love as much as good people and were much better at it.”
Quelle: Poor Things
“This slip has been inserted by mistake.”
An erratum slip in the first edition.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)
"Prometheus", pp. 208-9.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)
Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb.
"Prometheus", pp. 208-9.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)