Barry Graham > Quotes

“Carrying a shotgun makes you less amusing.”
― Barry Graham, Big Davey Joins the Majority: A Glasgow Noir Short Story

“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

“I had an eviction notice and a handgun, but I didn’t make any connection between them. Then I read about the invisible hand of the market, and it totally made sense. I wasn’t getting enough work as a musician, and I wasn’t getting hired at different jobs I applied for, so it was time to diversify.”
― Barry Graham, One for My Baby

“Imagine you’re at a movie, and the person sitting in front of you is so huge and fat you can’t see the screen because he’s completely blocking your view. He’s also talking loudly, so you can’t hear the movie.

That person is you. You can’t see the perfection of your life, as it is right now, because you’re in your own way.”
― Barry Graham, Kill Your Self: Life After Ego

“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

“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

“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

“We don’t know when the first star exploded, or when the sun caught on fire. We don’t know when the sun will stop burning and turn cold and dark, though we know it will.

In between the fire and the cold, life beginning and ending, Laura, sometime after being born and before dying, plays a game and talks to a sister who has never existed, while Frank tells a little girl named Whitney a story about the life and death of a dog, a story that he sometimes believes while telling it.

In the cities of the Sonoran Desert, the sunshine follows you into the shade. When you drink water anywhere, however pure the water, you’re drinking the piss of dinosaurs. The volume of water in this world has never varied. Nothing comes or goes, increases or decreases.

On a speck of dust in what they call the universe, David and Frank search for Laura, and Laura searches for David and Frank. La Llorona searches for her children. Whitney wants to not be sad. All of them search for love.”
― Barry Graham, When it all Comes Down to Dust

“When we attach to a problem, we make the problem worse. When we attach to a solution, we make the problem worse.”
― Barry Graham, Nothing Extra: Notes On the Zen Life

“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

“It was the sort of pub Alan liked, furnished with wall- to-wall forty-five-year-old gin-and-tonic drinkers. A notice on the wall behind the bar read: Please do not ask for credit, as a punch in the mouth often causes offence.”
― Barry Graham, The Champion's New Clothes

“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

“Spasm couldn’t get laid if you sent him to a brothel with a blank cheque. He had his Lou Reed and his Bob Hope, but never his Nat King Cole.”
― Barry Graham, Scumbo: Tales of Love, Sex and Death

“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

“As the bus passed a long stretch of coastline, for the first time I took no pleasure in the sight of it. The water was almost still and the sun seemed to be sinking into it. But this time the beauty wasn’t enough. Usually just a glimpse of it could put me in an instant good mood, but now I realized — I’d always known, but never realized — that you can’t escape to the sea. This isn’t Han Shan’s China or Thoreau’s America. That’s all gone now. If you decided you’d had enough and went off to live by the sea or up a mountain, you still couldn’t get away from the need for money. They’ve made it so that money and sustenance are the same thing.”
― Barry Graham, Scumbo: Tales of Love, Sex and Death

“Zen probably won’t solve a single one of our problems. What it might do is help us relate differently to what we consider problems.”
― Barry Graham, Kill Your Self: Life After Ego

“Then his eye was in my mouth, a string of bloody nerves dangling from my lips. I couldn’t believe how easily it came out. Even the feel and taste of it wouldn’t have convinced me if I hadn’t been looking straight into his fountaining red socket as I listened to him scream.”
― Barry Graham, How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy?

“He was shot in the chest while sitting in a friend’s car in Scottsdale. The killing was somehow related to drugs, no one knows exactly how. Or maybe Sophia knows, but she’s not admitting to it. She talks about him in glowing terms, describes their relationship as “perfect”, and yet says he used to hit her. Things weren’t easy when he was alive, and they haven’t gotten easier since his death. She works in her family’s restaurant and doesn’t have much money, which is why she still lives in the barrio. She tells me about a time when she woke in the middle of the night and found a man in her bedroom. He’d broken in through a window. She screamed at him to get out, and he said, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” and left. She now keeps a gun under her bed.”
― Barry Graham, Why I Watch People Die

“Soon it will be different. Soon there will be a night when we’re in my car and she’s screaming, raging, stabbing herself in the arm with a knife she’s pulled from her purse. Blood all over her, me and the dashboard. Me tearing up my shirt to bind her arm with. Her crying and saying she’s sorry. Everything being different, and then there being nothing between us.”
― Barry Graham, Why I Watch People Die

“I was seven years old when The Exorcist came out. I remember the grown-ups talking about it. I remember one grown-up saying she had to sleep with the light on for months after seeing it. I remember another saying he had to go on pills for his nerves after he saw it.”
― Barry Graham, When the Light-Bulb Is Bare: Essays on Horror and Noir

“Nobody saw what happened next, or else nobody admitted to it. A couple of people said they saw the Kid stand up, turn around quickly, and sit down again. But neither of those people was there at the time.

The teacher had turned her back to the class and was writing on the board. She heard something and looked around. Gordon Ritchie was coming towards her, reaching for her, whimpering. The Kid’s pen was sticking out of Gordon’s face. The Kid had stabbed him with it, stabbed him so hard that it pierced his cheek and impaled his tongue.

The teacher backed away from Gordon, trying to take in what she was seeing. Bubbles of blood were coming out of his mouth. Some of the children ran out of the room. Others screamed or cried. The Kid just sat at his desk, as though there had been no interruption to the class.”
― Barry Graham, Wrong Thing

“Render unto meditation the things that are meditation’s, and unto medication the things that are medication’s.”
― Barry Graham, Kill Your Self: Life After Ego

“Catboy slept that night curled up on the Kid’s chest. There was a huge windstorm that blew canopies of rain between the buildings of the apartment complex. Vanjii, of course, slept through it, but the Kid spent most of the night somewhere between waking and sleeping. He could hear the wind and rain all the time, and sometimes he could feel Catboy’s claws on his chest, kneading. He dreamed that the wind was an old bruja, a witch, wandering the deserted streets outside, looking for Catboy so she could take him away and hurt him.”
― Barry Graham, Wrong Thing

“Lotte wanted Francoise to stay the night, but she wouldn’t. Francoise thought of movies, usually thrillers, in which the hero gets out of bed during the night, dresses and slips out, leaving a beautiful woman asleep and unaware. Francoise wished she could leave like that, but her film was a realistic one. As she walked back to her apartment she thought that getting out of the relationship had been as awkward and messy as Lotte’s pulling her finger out of Francoise’s ass.”
― Barry Graham, Before: A Novel : With Stories 1987-1992

“You cuckold the poor bastard, then you turn into his marriage counselor.”
― Barry Graham, One for My Baby

“I told her I don’t think grief is a price we pay for love, but rather that it is a part of love. When death comes, I think the grief is to be experienced the way the joy was experienced before—and if we experience it intimately, grief and joy are not separate, and both are love.”
― Barry Graham, Nothing Extra: Notes On the Zen Life

“Before you can be of service to other beings, the heart has to awaken, which comes through diligent contemplative practice. And, when the heart awakens, all gaps close.”
― Barry Graham, Nothing Extra: Notes On the Zen Life