Dundee Quotes

“Secrets,’ she replied, casting my trousers aside, ‘are difficult things. Not precise. Not always the same for the one who tells as for the one who receives. They make demands. They may cause you to ask yourself, “Am I worthy?”’ At which, as if to illustrate the point, she removed her bra and watched me follow the lines of her magnificent form with my eyes.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“The coolies pull them across Howrah bridge, which they share with cars, trucks, bullock carts, a party of young women in saris strolling in no hurry wearing bangles on their ankles, an elephant also in no hurry, and a cow that is lying down in the middle of the road chewing lazily a booklet entitled Dr W C Roy’s SPECIFIC FOR INSANITY. The camera pauses on a portion of the half-eaten text: “Dr Roy’s insanity medicine acted a charm. I am completely cured,” says Srinath Ghosh of Bundelkund. 5 rupees per phial.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“Ranjana finds Stephen lying on an old string bed staring up at the ceiling and seeing in its myriad cracks the soothing drift of clouds. She puts what she’s brought to his lips, brushes them with her fingertips, and watches as he works the sweet onto his teeth. She feels a light touch on her arm encouraging her to lie next to him. She rests on her back, the pair of them laid out like two corpses waiting for the first shower of moist earth. After a while, she rolls over, nuzzles into his shoulder, and lets her hand fall limp and sweet across his chest. She drifts off to sleep, sweating in the arms of her lover.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“When the bell of my flat rings at four o’clock in the afternoon, I don’t expect a policeman to be standing outside. “Sorry to disturb you sir,” he says. “Detective sergeant McCorquodale. It’s about your mother.” Detective sergeant McCorquodale is an enormous lighthouse of a man with the untroubled skin of a baby and not a trace of facial hair; a sort of man-boy who’s overdosed on growth hormones.”
― Michael Tobert, Karna's Wheel

“For any artist, Dundee is just the perfect place to look at the rest of the world. Charles Mingus had a book called Beneath the Underdog. I always thought they should put that under Dundee on the sign outside the city.”
― Michael Marra

“I don't know. It's difficult being nice. I do like to be positive and I do like to do the right thing and I do like harmony. I don't get off on being a ... (whispers) 'cunt'.”
― Billy Mackenzie

“When my grandmother makes a mistake, she says 'Ah tell a leh'... But I feel the same whenever I use conversational English picked up after fourteen years at Oxford. Or whenever I lapse into a full-throated Dundonian Scots at home and someone announces, 'Ye've no lost yir accent'. Herbert speak with forked tongue.”
― W.N. Herbert, Don't Ask Me What I Mean: Modern Poets in their Own Words

“My habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary in retrospection I call them; but they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein