Quotes and excerpts of note

 

"But why do you like daylight? We're well lit by the usual means."

"I can measure time with it. I've counted thirty days since coming here, maybe I've missed a few by sleeping or drinking coffee, but when I remember something I can say, 'It happened two days ago,' or ten, or twenty. This gives my life a feeling of order." (5) (Cf.)

 

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"No wonder you've a morbid obsession with daylight. Instead of visiting ten parties since you came here, laying ten women and getting drunk ten times, you've watched thirty days go by. Instead of making life a continual feast you chop it into days and swallow them regularly, like pills." (5)

 

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This restlessness happened whenever his thoughts blundered on the question of who he was. "What does it matter who I am?" he asked aloud. "Why should I care why I came here?" (15)

 

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The first thing I remember is

 

After a few more words he scored out what he had written and started again. He did this four times, each time remembering an earlier event than the one he described. At last he found a beginning and wrote steadily until he had filled thirteen pages. (15)

 

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So I returned to my compartment and noticed, as I shut the door behind me, a small rucksack on the rack above the corner seat. This made mewary. Since waking up I had felt wonderfully free and comfortable. I had been pleased to see I was alone and amused to find the carriage coupld in a goods train, but the knapsack frightened me. I knew it was mine and held something nasty but I was reluctant to throw it out the window. (16)

 

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I opened the window, dropped them out and pulled the window shut. [...] I threw the key and diary after the wallet and map. (17)

 

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"Who were the people in the big hall?"

"Doctors, like you and me."

"But doctors were a tiny minority."

"Do you think so? I suppose it's possible. We need engineers and clerks and chemists to supervice lighting and synthesize food and so on, but we only see those in the halls; they have their own corridoors. They're a strange lot. Every one of them, even the plumbers and wireless operators, think their own profession is the institute, and everyone else exists to serve them. I supposeit makes their work seem more worthwhile, but if they reflected seriously they would see that the institute lives by purging the intake."

"Purging the intake?"

"Doctoring the patients." (63) (Cf.)

 

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"This is the largest deterioration ward. We keep the hopeless softs here. They're quite happy. Come and look."

"You said I need see nobody whose problem is not a form of my own!"

"Problems take different forms but they're all caused by the same error. Come and see." (63)

 

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"I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart." (66)

 

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"The heat made by a body should move easily through it, overflowing the pores, penis, anus, eyes, lips, limbs and fingertips in acts of generosity and self-preservation. But many people are afraid of the cold and try to keep more heat than they give, they stop the heat from leaving through an organ or limb, and the stopped heat forges the surface into hard insulating armour." (68)

 

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"Names are nothing but collars men tie round your neck to drag you where they like." (73)

 

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"[...] What do you dislike?"

"The hypocrisy. The way they pretend to care while using the patients up."

"But they could help nobody if they didn't use their failures."

The girl bent her head so that he only saw the top of it and muttered, "You don't hate the place if you can say that." (89)

 

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"You should have taken that coat. I didn't want you to be cold." (95)

 

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"Ah, it could be easily destroyed if it was a simple murder machine. But it is like all machines, it profits those who own it, and nowadays many sections are owned by gentle, powerless people who don't know they are cannibals and who wouldn't believe if you told them. It is also amazingly tolerant of anyone it considers human, and cures more people than you realize. Even the societies who denounce it would (most of them) collapse if it vanished, for it is an important source of knowledge and energy." (102)

 

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"I had become bodiless in a bodiless world. I existed as a series of thoughts amidst infinite greyness." (111)

 

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A Bleak Man Tells Why He Likes Bleakness/ It Seems a Strength but Proves a Weakness/ When Every Body Is Withdrawn/ There's Nothing to Fall Back Upon/ Returning to His Sensual Birth/ A Splendid Body Gives Him Worth/ A Reckless Body Gives Him Worth/ But Not Enough to Make Him Well/ Can Lanark Lead Him Out of Hell?/ Can He Help Lanark Out of Hell? (108-17)

 

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Hell was the one truth and pain the one fact which nullified all others. Sufficient health was like thin ice on an infinite sea of pain. Love, work, art, science and law were dangerous games played on the ice; all homes and cities were built on it. The ice was frail. A tiny shrinkage of the bronchial tubes could put him under it and a single split atom could sink a city. (160)

 

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A story can always end happily by stopping at a cheerful moment. Of course in nature the only end is death, but death hardly ever happens when people are at their best. That is why we like tragedies. They show men ending energetically with their wits about them and deserving to do it.

"Did Thaw die tragically?"

No. He botched his end. It set no example, not even a bad one. He was unacceptable to the infinite bright blankness, the clarity without edge which only selfishness fears. It flung him back into a second-class railway carriage, creating you. (219)

 

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"[...] This patient, gentlemen, is suffering from adaption. Let me give you an example of adaption. A hardworking man of thiry loses his job through no fault of his own. For two or three months he hunts for work but can't find any. His national insurance money runs out and he goes on the dole. In these circumstances his energy and initiative are a burden to him. They make him want to break things and punch people. So instinctively his metabolism lowers itself. He grows slovenly and depressed. A year or two passes, he's offered a job at last and refuses it. Unemployment has become his way of life. He's adapted to it. In the same way some people come here with commonplace illnesses which, after an initial improvement, stop responding to treatment. Why? In the absence of other factors we must assume that the patient has adapted to the hospital itself. He has reverted to an infantile state in which suffering and being regularly fed feel actually safer than health. [...] (312-13)

 

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The whisperer was a black crow which flew behind his head. (347)

 

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She knelt on the grass, covered her face and wept hysterically while Lanark started helplessly laughing, for he felt a burden lifted from him, a burden he had carried all his life without noticing. (386)

 

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"This is Hell," said Lanark.

"There are worse hells," said Jack. (432)

 

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"Employment. Stability. Surroundings. Three offices, yet properly understood they are the same. Employment ensures stability. Stability lets us reshape our surroundings. The improved surroundings become a new condition of employment. The snake eats its tail. Nothing has precedence. This great building -- this centre of all centres, this tower of welfare -- exists to maintain full employment, reasonable stability and decent surroundings." (438)

 

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The shape seemed the same but the substance had changed. (463)

 

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The quiet man said quietly, "We aren't interested in the detailed character stuff. We just want to convey that the right man has been found for the right job."

"A new figure strides into the political arena," said the reckless man. "Where does he come from?"

"From Unthank," said Sludden. "He and I were close friends in our early days. We hung about sowing our wild oats with the same bohemian crowd, measuring out our life with coffee spoons and trying to find a meaning. I did nothing at all in those days but Lanark, to his credit, produced one of the finest fragments of autobiographical prose and social commentary it has been my privilege to criticize. [...] He entered the institute and wrked with Ozenfant. Although a mainstay of the energy division, his qualities were not appreciated and eventually, sickened by bureaucratic ineptitude, he returned to Unthank: but not before registering a strong personal protest to the lord president director." [...]

"I can tell you what happened themn," said Gilchrist amiably. "He devoted himself to public service by working in the Central Centre for Employment, Stability and Surroundings. I was his boss and I soon realized he was something of a saint. When confronted by human suffering he had absolutely no patience with red tape. To be frank, he often went too fast for me, and that is why he is exactly the lord provost the region needs. I can imagine no better politician to represent Greater Unthank at the forthcoming general assembly." (464)

 

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"There is a social report cuffering all the olt ground -- no region our size has so much unemployment, uses so much corporal punishment in schools, has so many children cared for by the state, so much alcoholism, so many adults in prison or such a shortage of housing. It is all very olt stuff but people should be reminded." (465)

 

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[...T]he watcher was surely Sandy and at once the grotesque flimsy aircraft and being a delegate and a provost seemed stupid evasions of the realest thing in the world [...] (467)

 

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To left and right was a beach of pure sand as pearly-pale as the clouds, and the round lake and its beaches were enclosed by two curving shores which made the shape of an eye. And Lanark saw that it was an eye, and the feeling which came to him then was too new to have a name. His mouth and mind opened wide and the only thought left was a wonder if he -- a speck of a speck floating before that large pupil -- was seen by it. (468)

 

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And if I really lived here once, and was happy, how did I lose it? Why am I only returning now? (470)

 

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"You think you've found the truth when you've replaced the cheerful view by the opposite, but true profundity blends all possible views, bright as well as dark." (477)

 

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"The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason." (484)

 

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First he had been a child, then a schoolboy, then his mother died. He became a student, tried to work as a painter and became very ill. He hung uselessly round cafes for a time, then took a job in an institute. He got mixed up with a woman there, lost the job, then went to live in a badly governed place where his son was born. The woman and child left him, and for no very clear reason he had been sent on a mission to some sort of assembly. This had been hard at first, then easy, because he was suddenly a famous man with important papers in his briefcase. Women loved him. He had been granted an unexpected holiday with Sandy, then something cold had stung his cheek--- (518)

 

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He felt that something very good had happened recently. It may not have been love, but it had left him ready for love. Delight had opened him, prepared him for someone who wasn't there. He was anguished by the absence [...] (519)

 

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"I was fooled by false love because I never knew the true kind, not even with Rima. Why? I was faithful to her not because I loved her but because I wanted love [...]

 

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He was the mind of this bird [...] (552)

 

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Memory is an editing process which inevitably exaggerates some episodes, suppresses others and arranges events in neater orders, but nobody assumes that of their own memory. I don't. (568)