Glasgow Quotes

“Rain was a natural state of Glasgow. It kept the grass green and the people pale and bronchial.”
― Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain

“Billy Rankin is a true Glasgow rock legend. He has everything going for him: he's a brilliant guitarist, he writes killer songs, he's worked with the best, toured the world and he is one handsome-looking chap. I know all of this because Billy told me.”
― Robert Fields, Minstrels, Poets and Vagabonds: A History of Rock Music in Glasgow

“He said he loves her more because she makes him smile. Fine! I'll give him the Glasgow smile. Beat that, bitch!”
― Natalya Vorobyova, Better to be able to love than to be loveable

“She was sitting at the kitchen table, naked. She had a chopper in her right hand. Her left hand was flat on the able in front of her. She’d chopped off her thumb, index and middle fingers. They were in a neat row on the table, which was thick with dark blood.”
― Barry Graham, Of Darkness and Light

“When I swore at my father and he brandished his big belt, he thought he was beating all the contempt and all the defiance out of me. He only beat it farther in. They told me they were going to have me put in a home, but I didn’t know what a home was and I wasn’t afraid. They invented new cruelties, and I invented new worlds their cruelties couldn’t reach.”
― Barry Graham, The Book of Man

“Opposite the gates was a low concrete building. Dozens of men were spilling out of its windowless structure and stood in dark clumps on the Pit Road. At first it looked like they were leaving chapel, but as the diesel engine roared nearer, they turned as if they were one. The miners stopped their talking and squinted to get a good look. They all wore the same black donkey jackets and were holding large amber pints and sucking on stubby doubts. The miners had scrubbed faces and pink hands that looked free of work. It seemed wrong, these men being the only clean thing for miles. Reluctantly, the miners parted and let the taxi go by. Leek watched them as they were watching him. His stomach sank. The men all had his mother’s eyes.”
― Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain

“John Galt was closer to the genial side of Scott, if with a narrower focus in the material he chose to write about - but for all that giving us, in thin disguise, real places and real changes in a real nation. He dealt above all with the West of Scotland, and was indeed a patriot of the region. It irked him that Edinburgh had won the epithet of Athens of the North and tried to create a fashion for calling Glasgow the Venice of the North; somehow this never caught on.”
― Michael Fry, A New Race of Men: Scotland 1815 - 1914

“Maybe it wasn’t that job particularly; maybe it was just working for someone else. It’s so brutal and tiring, the way it can push you down and knock the heart out of you. It’s not getting up at a certain time and arriving at a certain place at a certain time and leaving at a certain time and coming back again at a certain time — it’s knowing that you have to. What’s worse is that, through age or job-experience or academic qualification or sheer good luck, one adult is in a position to order and insult and abuse and shout at another adult who isn’t in a position to reply in kind. It makes everyone a tin god. Everyone likes having slaves to beat, as they’re beaten themselves. And working on the grind wears you out. After a week of it you’re so tired that you use the weekend just to catch up on your rest before going back to another week of it.”
― Barry Graham, The Book of Man

“Possil — and other areas like it, in other cities — has been in that state for so long that it now gives birth to itself. No chance of revolution now — the anger is muted and turned inwards. Possil picks at its own sores. When somebody manages to get a new car, somebody else is bound to torch it. But it doesn’t occur to them to head out to Bearsden or Newton Meams, the places where the nobs live, and torch a few Mercs or Rolls Royces. They don’t do it to the people whose opinion matters. They only do it to each other. And who in Newton Mearns cares if a bunch of schemies on the other side of town burn their own property? And so Possil, and Maryhill, and Easterhouse, and Drumchapel all stay the same.”
― Barry Graham, The Book of Man

“Sometimes Mike would fuck her and I’d watch. They didn’t go to bed; they didn’t even take their clothes off. Mike would just stick it into her, stick it in at the crook of her elbow, and tease her till she moaned. Then he’d press the plunger and her whole body would shudder in a junk orgasm.”
― Barry Graham, The Book of Man

“The only ones who ever went to a Tory conference with good intentions were the IRA.”
― Barry Graham, Get Out as Early As You Can

“There were rat footprints in the dried lard in the frying pan. Sometimes the rats woke me, but this time I had slept through their visit. They were now a fact of life, like dogs or pigeons.

It was Raeberry Street, Maryhill, Glasgow in 1975. The cleansing department was on strike, and mountains of plastic bags full of garbage were piled in the back courts of the crumbling tenements. The flats didn’t have bathrooms or hot water, just closet-sized toilets.”
― Barry Graham, When the Light-Bulb Is Bare: Essays on Horror and Noir

“Glasgow is more than body and more than head; She is both head and body. Her air of independent and self-contained metropolitanism - different from, and balancing, that of London - is the first thing that strikes the stranger who visits her after seeing the English provincial cities. And though most of the human elements of this metropolitanism [have been drawn from all Scotland, from Ireland, from England, and even from the Continent and Judaea, Glasgow is vitally self supporting to a greater extent than any other very large city; and while, by means of trade, travel, and intellectual sympathy, the sphere of her civic interests is in actuality the whole world, in immediate appearance it is frontiered by the city's wide boundaries.”
― William Power, Pavement and Highway: Specimen Days in Strathclyde

“The other day, in the course of one of those more or less clandestine visits to the city on the Clyde I make from time to time, I was walking down Buchanan Street when I came smack up against something I'd never seen before: that sculpture of a big bird struggling into flight called Concept of Kentigern. Maybe Glasgow is about ready to leave its status as industrial mastadon of the Western world and fly over into other dimensions. Maybe there's a good time coming.”
― Kenneth White, Cencrastus No. 12: Spring 1983

“Soon after the marriage of Miss Meg, George, the third son, and youngest of the family, was placed in the counting house of one of the most eminent West Indian merchants at that period in Glasgow. This incident was in no other respect important in the history of the Lairds of Grippy, than as serving to open a career to George, that would lead him into a higher class of acquaintance than his elder brothers: for it was about this time that the general merchants began to arrogate to themselves that aristocratic superiority over the shopkeepers, which they have since established into an oligarchy, as proud and sacred, in what respects the reciprocities of society, as the famous Seignories of Venice and Genoa.”
― John Galt, The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy

“Glasgow can be uncommonly dreich, smirr blurring the architectural mishmash of the city's skyline.
The east coast plays host to some truly cruel gales, eroding the sharp edges off fishermen's cottages in Fife and Angus.
In the winter months it can feel like the country takes any opportunity to grind to a halt.
The faintest threat of snow causes chaos across road, rail and air.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“Gleska! Some day when I'm in the key for't I'll mak a song aboot her. Here the triumphs o civilisation meet ye at the stair fit, and three bawbee mornin rolls can be had after six o'clock at nicht for a penny.

There's libraries scattered a ower the place; I ken, for I've seen them often, and the brass plate at the door tellin ye whit they are.

Art's a the go in Gleska too; there's something aboot it every ither nicht in the papers, when Lord Somebody-or-ither's no divorcin his wife, and takin up the space; and I hear there's hunders o pictures oot in yon place at Kelvingrove.

Theatres, concerts, balls, swarees, lectures - ony mortal thing ye like that'll keep ye oot o yer bed, ye'll get in Gleska if ye have the money to pay for't.”
― Neil Munro, Erchie, My Droll Friend

“A combination of policies to attract work to areas of unemployment and to disperse the congested population of the Glasgow conurbation has created a new Scotland, neither urban or rural, which straggles westwards from the fringes of the Firth of Forth to the lower Clyde. It is this unknown Scotland, not in the guidebooks, away from the motorway, seen fleetingly from the express, that holds the key to the modern politics of the country.”
― Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics 1707 to the Present

“If you're asking if she had an influence on my picture-taking, yes, Joan Eardley more than anyone. Her work has an immediate quality, a realism and a kind of urgency. Here in her paintings were the chidren of the tenements as I recall them in my own childhood in Garnethill, which was a very mixed area; Hungarians, Italians, Irish, Polish, Lithuanian. And the ladies going to the steamie, hanging the washing out of the window. It made a fair mark on me.”
― Oscar Marzaroli

“It is perhaps surprising that in eighteenth century travellers' accounts Glasgow is most often compared with Oxford for the beauty of its prospect and the excellence of its ambience. It was post-industrial Revolution accounts of the city that began to articulate the 'Glasgow discourse' which was to become hegenomic. Initially signalled in urban planning and public health reports of the nineteenth century, this discourse was powerfully accelerated by tabloid journalistic accounts of gang warfare in interwar Glasgow and by folkloric embellishments of these. The result was that a monstrous Ur-narrative comes into play when anyone (not least, it should be said, Glaswegians themselves) seeks to describe or deal imaginatively with that city. In this archetypal narrative, Glasgow is the City of Dreadful Night with the worst slums in Europe, its citizens living out lives which are nasty, brutish and short. The milieu of Glasgow is so stark, so the narrative runs, that it breeds a particular social type, the Hard Man, a figure whose universe is bounded by football, heavy drinking and (often sectarian) violence. The image of Glasgow, which beckons, Circe-like, to any who would speak or write of that city, is one of men celebrating, coming to terms with or (rarely) transcending their bleak milieu. An order of marginalisation, if not exclusion, is served on women.”
― Colin McArthur, The Cinematic City

“Now I am sitting in the Botanic Gardens. Though the puddles are frozen in the shade, you could sit out for ever so long in the sun without feeling cold. No one there but children with their nurses, and old men with pale, dreamy eyes thinking of nothing, perhaps wondering vaguely if they will hold on to see another spring. I am on a bench overlooking the Kelvin, and have been watching the seagulls. Whole flocks have come up inland from the Clyde. There are rooks too, very noisy and restless, deceived perhaps by the sunshine into thinking the winter is over.”
― Catherine Carswell, The Camomile

“...how can I describe Endrick Street to anyone who has never been in it? 'Ugly' is not the word that describes it. it is just one of those desperate streets which we have here and there in Glasgow and, so far as I have seen, you have not at all in London. It is long and black and melancholy as a stone chasm. All hope abandons you as you enter it. From morning till night there is the sound of worn carpets being beaten, and of stone steps being scrubbed by landladies in Hinde's curlers. The great windows are always left dirty, the broken black railings are never repaired, and there is a smell of soot as if a chimney had just been on fire. Nothing seems to thrive in the back greens but soot and cats. I have never once walked down it but there has been a half empty coal-cart on the roadway with a man standing up in it his hand to his mouth, wailing the words 'Coal briquettes!”
― Catherine Carswell, The Camomile

“In SMT Magazine and Scottish Country Life, Alastair Borthwick informed would-be visitors that 'Facing you as you enter... are the Cascades - seventeen waterfalls pouring 400 feet down the hillside - and the Grand Staircase, which is a double flight of steps running on either side of the cascades'. Soaring above these at the crest of Bellahouston Hill was the exhibition's 'sensational and symbolic centrepiece' - the 300-feet-high Tower of Empire which Thomas S. Tait designed with assistance from Launcelot Ross and from structural engineer James Mearns... In height, it was equivalent to a skyscraper - a building type most Scots would have known only from illustrations in newspapers and magazines - but the effect of slenderness Tait achieved also made it suggestive of some sort of futuristic scence fiction fantasy structure that might be used to tether airships, for example. Its design captured the imaginations of all who saw it and it was undoubtedly the exhibition's one truly awe-inspiring building.”
― Bruce Peter, Art Deco Scotland: Design and Architecture in the Jazz Age

“KING BILLY

Go from the grave. The shrill flutes
are silent, the march dispersed.
Deplore what is to be deplored,
then find out the rest.”
― Edwin Morgan, The Second Life: Selected Poems

“No screaming of shells, no thunder of guns, only this close, hard pressure of human bodies, this desperate push of starving men.”
― Dot Allan, Makeshift & Hunger March: Two Novels

“In the thick and stagnant darkness John Stark lay wide awake.”
― A. McArthur, No Mean City

“Carswell's novels, Open the Door! (1920) and The Camomile (1922) sit both inside and outside the school of urban fiction. While the spaces of Glasgow thrum in their pages and are - as is frequent in other urban fiction - characterised by their contrast with alternative locales, interest in the city is also aesthetic. Glasgow here is also a city of artistic sensibilities and aspirations, of the avant-garde”
― Glenda Norquay, The International Companion to the Scottish Novel

“Like the great bell in the tower, its clapper silenced, the University hung suspended over the city, a shell.”
― J.F. Hendry, Fernie Brae: A Scottish Childhood

“If you play Mr. Glasgow and that it's a fine warm-hearted city then you are kidding yourself, kidding the pubic, and pledging the future to no reform.”
― George Friel

“Belongs! Belongs! A dirty, filthy city. But with a kind of ample vitality which has created fame for her slums and her industry and given her moral and spiritual existence a tight ingrown wealth, like a human character limited, but with a direct brutish strength, almost warm.”
― Archie Hind, The Dear Green Place