Mcilvanney Quotes

Writing is a way of sharing our humanity.

Son, it’s easy tae be guid oan a fu’ belly. It’s when a man’s goat two bites an’ wan o’ them he’ll share, ye ken whit he’s made o’. Listen. In ony country in the world, who are the only folk that ken whit it’s like tae leeve in that country? The folk at the boattom. The rest can a’ kid themselves oan. They can afford to hiv fancy ideas. We canny, son. We loass the wan idea o’ who we are, we’re deid. We’re wan anither. Tae survive, we’ll respect wan anither. When the time comes, we’ll a’ move forward thegither, or nut at all.

I don’t like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is.

The law's not about justice. It's a system we've put in place because we can't have justice.

Coulda made something o’ himself. But a luckless man. All his days a luckless man. The kinna man woulda got two complimentary tickets for the Titanic.” The unintentional humour of her remark was like her natural appetite for life reasserting itself. Harkness couldn’t stop smiling. It was as if Glasgow couldn’t shut the wryness of its mouth even at the edge of the grave.

The kinna man woulda got two complimentary tickets for the Titanic.

His face looked like an argument you couldn't win.

Gin and catatonic?

The old man opened the door with all the ease of the Venus de Milo cracking a safe.

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.

But, imagining Scott’s nights here, I populated the emptiness. This had been one of his places and some small part of his spirit had been left here. Holding my own brief séance for my brother, I conjured vivid faces and loud nights. I saw that smile of his, sudden as a sunray, when he loved what you were saying. I saw the strained expression when he felt you must agree with him and couldn’t get you to see that. I caught the way the laughter would light up his eyes when he was trying to suppress it. I heard the laughing when it broke. He must have had some nights here. He had lived with such intensity. The thought was my funeral for him. Who needed possessions and career and official achievements? Life was only in the living of it. How you act and what you are and what you do and how you be were the only substance. They didn’t last either. But while you were here, they made what light there was – the wick that threads the candle-grease of time. His light was out but here I felt I could almost smell the smoke still drifting from its snuffing.

The simplicity of this case offends me. It's so neat, it's like a preconception. One thing you can be sure about any preconception. It's wrong. If there's a God and he tried to preconceive the world, he got it wrong.

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.

But there are two basic kinds of professional, Harkness saw in a moment of self-congratulatory illumination. There’s the professionalism that does something well enough to earn a living from it. And there’s the professionalism that creates a commitment so intense that the earning of a living happens by the way. Its dynamic isn’t wages but the determination to do something as well as it can be done.

Like everything else in Balla, they were made of slate. The men worked them during slack times at the quarry. That’s what you did when you found a free half-hour: you worked your own headstone, cutting the cross or the crown at the top, and then carving your name and birthdate under ‘Sacred to the Memory of’ and a bas-relief opened book, leaving only the final date to be carved by another hand.

The beast he had fought, that ravens upon others, slept underneath my chair.

Theatre,' Davy said. 'That's what houses are, you know. Just theatre. All buildings are. Charades of permanence. They're fantasies. Fictions we make about ourselves. Right?

The very fact that you can flout the law like that proves how little it means. It's just a set of rules for those who happen to get caught. And if you can make a mockery of the law and thrive, it would be a bit immodest to think you were the only one. Wouldn't it? Dave knew his guilt must also be a lot of other people's. It was the nature of the game. That was a find. It was like splitting his private atom. He understood the structure of things. Hypocrisy wasn't a weakness for him. It became a strength. It wasn't social death. It was the lifeblood of career. No wonder he's such a successful man. It's quite simple, really, when you think of it. The bad have limitless capabilities. The good are constrained. The hypocritical good have got it made. They have a structure of conformity that is plainly visible from the outside. Inside it, there are subterranean passageways in which anything is allowed to happen.

Who are the bitterest people in the world? The failed idealists, I would think.

I knew that there was in me a recurrent tendency to think back to the excitement of new beginnings and regret the ends they've come to. The bitterness that can give rise to is bearing false witness to life. I thought that the essence of life lies not in the defeat of our expectations but in the joy that they were ever there at all. Life's a spendthrift mother. Once she has given what she has, it's ungrateful to complain that she didn't have the foresight to take out an insurance policy on your behalf. You just say thanks.

This room was the resort of men who hadn’t much beyond a sense of themselves and weren’t inclined to have that sense diminished. Harkness recognised a feeling he had experienced in other East-End pubs, and understood precisely where the tension came from. It came from the realisation that just by coming in you had shucked the protection of your social status. In this place your only credentials were yourself.

I don’t have fights. I have wars.

The walls were dun and featureless, the furniture was arranged with all the homeyness of a second-hand sale-room and clothes were littered everywhere. It wasn’t a room so much as a suitcase with doors.

According

Laidlaw had seen that quality of arbitrarily shifting perspective before, always in people whose environment was putting them under pressure. It was as if they had been overtaken by the hardness of their experience and mugged by it, so that they lived the rest of their lives concussed.

I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened. I did a year, passed

See, you always buy with notes. Coins are beneath you. You become a whisky-millionaire.

Macey watched her buttocks move in her fawn cords as if they were chewing a very sweet caramel.

the things he hated most was élitism. We share in everyone else or forego ourselves. ‘Hullo there, captain.

Laidlaw was reminded that he didn't want the heaven of the holy or the Utopia of the idealists. He wanted the scuffle of living now every day as well as he could manage without the exclusive air-conditioning of creeds and, after it, just the right to lie down with all those others who had settled for the same. It seemed to him the hardest thing to do.

Some people were in the park pretending it was warm, exercising that necessary Scottish thrift with weather which hoards every good day in the hope of some year amassing a summer. The scene was a kind of Method School of Weather—a lot of people trying to achieve a subjective belief in the heat in the hope of convincing one another.

For them that evening war wasn’t politics or geography or the mobilisation of forces. It was, as they entered their houses, a special diffidence in the eyes of some of their women. It was a sharper etching of objects around them, as if a film had been scraped from their eyeballs. It was how the kettle was a comfort, the battered chair luxurious, the collapsing of a coal-husk in the fire inexpressibly elegiac.

don’t like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is.

Interesting, isn't it' he said. "The ambiguity of things. I can talk about the mockery that's my life and sip coffee at the same time. I can sit in my own guilt like an armchair. We're strange things. I sometimes think our lives are a contract with the impossible. If we're going to live together, we have to sign that contract. But most of us know we can't really meet its terms. So we insert our private clauses in small print. And don't mention it to anybody else. Only the best of us try to abide by the contract. And the attempt often destroys them.

...urban deprivation, the condition of being so sophisticated that you plumb the nature of most other people's experience out of your life like waste. Your attitudes are so glib and self-assured and automatic, you lose the necessary naivety that is living. That way, you eat everything and taste nothing.

Why do the best of us go to waste while the worst of us flourish? Maybe I had found a clue. I could think of one reason why people as potentially rich in life as Alice and Scott seemed far less well and be apparently less successful than Martin and Anna. Those who love life take risks, those who don't take insurance. But that was all right, I decided. Life repays its lovers by letting them spend themselves on it. Those who fail to love it, it cunningly allows very carefully to accrue their own hoarded emptiness. In living, you won by losing big, you lost by winning small.

The family came next, glooming out of the gorgeous black car like moping royals, like a dynasty heading into exile.

Aye. He was very nice there. The rest of my life’ll be an anti-climax.

and a red-haired character actor from River City,

They’d given Kilgour a mate, put him in with a fairy they’d lifted on Kelvin Way. Cold white tiles. A shitter with no seat.

They made Lennie feel like an actor who has wandered into the wrong play.

The Oban lot were Rangers fans and the Balla boys were Celtic. Time to go.

head in the direction of Pollokshaws Road; a few of them were meeting for a pint in Heraghty’s Bar.

It was an accident of geography that placed Celtic’s stadium next to the city’s bitterest Loyalist enclave.

Our ire was reserved for SPL referees and perceived acts of bias against Glasgow Celtic Football Club.

don’t have fights. I have wars.’ To Harkness

A crime you’re trying to solve is a temporary

can protect the relatives of the victim from atavism.

The year came and receded like any other leaving its flotsam of the grotesque, the memorable, the trivial.

destination

The place had the gritty untidiness of belonging to no one, a litter bin for wasted time.

They looked as if they were trying to threaten their own destination into appearing.

She was the perfect end to a crappy day, brusque, supercilious and precisely as pleasant as a boil on the sphincter.

Laidlaw’s mind put on its working clothes.

She looked like a woman you might jump a few lights to get home to.

His face was as welcoming as a turned back.

They saw five men with travelling bags making more noise than a revolution and being harmless.

He hit McMaster twice, with the left from fear, with the right from courtesy.

Akitchen in the morning: it can be a garden of the senses.

putting your faith in Milligan is just a fancy term for despair.

dapper bandleader called Harry Margolis

He could picture Billy McNeill hoisting it in triumph, last year – no, the year before – at the Estádio Nacional in Lisbon.

The road, it seemed, was a river and he was the only one who knew the stepping-stones.

The words of the Hail Mary started up in his head, repeating on a loop like piped Muzak while his mind drifted off to other things—

Perhaps it was just that, born in Scotland, you were hanselled with remorse, set up with shares in Calvin against your coming of age, so that much of the energy you expended came back guilt.

I mean if everybody could waken up tomorrow morning and have the courage of their doubts, not their convictions, the millennium would be here. I think false certainties are what destroy us. And Milligan’s full of them. He’s a walking absolute. What’s murder but a willed absolute, an invented certainty? An existential failure of nerve. What we shouldn’t do is compound the felony in our reaction to it. And that’s what people keep doing. Faced with the enormity, they lose their nerve, and where