Alasdair Gray

Of all the nations I have visited the U.S.A. and Russia suit me best. The people seem more ready to talk to strangers without being formal or disapproving. Is this because, like me, they have very little past?

the only words which fed my hopes were the second last two which declared she was mine faithfully. This is a conventional business phrase, but Bella was neither conventional nor in business.

“Exactly!” cried Bella with a frightening gust of anger. “I am only half a woman Candle, less than half having had no childhood, the bit of life Miss MacTavish said we dragged clouds of glory into, no sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice-little-girlhood, no early-love’s-young-dream-womanhood. A whole quarter century of my life has vanished crash bang wallop. So the few wee memories in this hollow Bell tinkle clink clank clatter rattle clang gong ring dong ding sound resound resonate detonate vibrate reverberate echo re-echo around this poor empty skull in words words words words wordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswords that try to make much of little but cannot. I need more past. 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. But Duncan will give me a lot of past fast. Duncan is quick.”

A doctor who could pay Strang to etch pictures for a privately printed book must have had a larger income than most public health officers, yet the Archibald McCandless whose face was on the frontispiece had not the look of a rich man or a doctor

Like Boswell, the self-effacing McCandless makes his narrative a host to letters by others who show his subject from a different angle, and ends by revealing a whole society

Godwin Baxter was the only one I talked with as an equal because (I still believe) we were the two most intelligent and least social people attached to the Glasgow medical faculty

Sir Colin’s lack of interest in female beauty was legendary,” one of the gossips told me, “but his offspring proves he had a peculiar appetite for female ugliness.”

A day earlier we had been the only members of the medical faculty to attend a lecture by Clerk Maxwell, and both thought it odd that students who must one day diagnose diseases of the eye cared nothing for the physical nature of light.

“The public hospitals are places where doctors learn how to get money off the rich by practising on the poor. That is why poor people dread and hate them, and why those with a good income are operated upon privately, or in their own homes

Please remember,” I told him, “that our hospitals have been improved since then.”

“They have indeed—thanks to good nursing. Our nurses are now the truest practitioners of the healing art