Quotessence
Home / Authors / Don Paterson
Don Paterson

Don Paterson Quotes

Poet

Filter quotes by topic

AllPoetryArtLightLiteraturePagesPoetReaderReadingShadowTurns

Famous Don Paterson Quotes

“...it's perhaps time to admit that our perennial call to "work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation" has become something of an empty shibboleth. The petty, tribal, precriptive, censorious, identity-obsessed and philistine culture the SNP have created has left many older centrist heids reluctant to speak up over matters of simple common sense and public concern, conceding many of them not just to the right (with whom they are now occasionally driven to make common cause), but - far more dangerously - to the self-declared racists, sexists, homophobes and fascists who should represent our common enemy. The SNP are also, in their current incarnation, poor stewards of the independence dream. As we enter a pre-war era of economic uncertainty and shifting alliances, rediscovering it will be a far more sober and adult task than we have previously had to face. We first must decide what it is we mean by "better nation". It will have to be one with considerably more courage, genuine inclusivity and stomach for honest and civil debate than we currently demonstrate. It will require us to tackle the kinds of broad disadvantage that animate the electorate, as well as those narrow causes which excite our political and institutional leaders. It will require an Enlightenment-style revival of an artistic and intellectual meritocracy, one which can actively connect and draw on the talents of an increasingly diverse but distinctively Scottish society.”

CultureIndependenceIntellectScotlandMeritocracyIdentity PoliticsPolitical CulturePhilistinismScottish NationalismSnp
Book:Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland
Create image

“This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give to the reader; and in doing so they turn language against its own project of conceptual division, and use it to heal itself - and in the process - paradoxically - to articulate new concepts that it can't yet accommodate.”

GivingUsePoetryTurnsReadingLiteratureLanguageProcessPracticePoetReaderProjectsConceptsCapacityHealDivisionAccommodateHeal Itself
Author:Don Paterson
Create image

“Lakoff's idea is that most of our thought is guided by underlying conceptual mappings between two domains that share some content, that overlap in the sets of their attributes. ... Contrary to the assertions of Lakoff and some of the cognitive metaphor theorists, people can read through to an underlying mapping, but only when the surface metaphor is new to them.”

PeopleTwoIdeasPoetryLiteratureShareMetaphorSurfaceContraryAttributesOur ThoughtsDomainAssertionCognitiveTheoristsMapping
Author:Don Paterson
Create image