Quotes by Scottish Authors

The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.
Sara Sheridan
Indeed, I have observed one ingredient, somewhat necessary in a man’s composition towards happiness, which people of feeling would do well to acquire; a certain respect for the follies of mankind: for there are so many fools whom the opinion of the world entitles to regard, whom accident has placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he who cannot restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight will be too often quarrelling with the disposal of things to relish that share which is allotted to himself. 
Henry MacKenzie
This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.
Hal Duncan
...It is a well known fact that most artists produce their best work early in their career. They may refine what they do but you usually get the measure of what they are about on their first outing.
Bill Drummond
Tonight I can smell the season the way it's usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you're used to it, when you've forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.
Ali Smith
And Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!
Thomas Campbell
Celeste committed the cardinal sin of leaning across Jack's arm. "You will excuse me, Madam, but I have something most particular to say to Monsieur Trestain.""That was rude," jack said, though he was smiling."No doubt you thought her very beautiful.""No doubt that is what you think I thought.
Marguerite Kaye
Why d’you think she did it?”I told him I had no idea. He seemed disappointed that I shouldn’t know.“A broken heart,” I suggested.“Do people suffer so much?”“For love? Oh, I imagine so.”“To drown herself?”“Why does that astonish you? Dido threw herself on the flames.”“In legend.”“And real life’s different?” I asked.
Ronald Frame
Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us And foolish notion.
Robert Burns
There is a time when to avoid trouble is to store up trouble and when to seek for a lazy and a cowardly peace is to court a still greater danger.
William Barclay
The truth Fear tells is not much better than her lies.
George MacDonald
She was riding a camel, in the most beautiful desert, in the kingdom belonging to this most beautiful man. A man who thought she had the most delightful rear. A man who wanted to kiss her every bit as much as she wanted to kiss him. "I know that I will regret saying this, but at this moment in time, I think I could manage anything.
Marguerite Kaye
He was in awe of the thirst that people had for someone to tell them that everything was going to be all right. He marveled at the gullibility and vulnerability of his fellow humans. No wonder the churches called them sheep. They were woolly-headed pack animals being herded around for the benefit of whoever knew how to control the dogs.
Craig Ferguson
Words were stories in themselves.
Ali Smith
Even as I'm shoveling up my hooter, I realize the sad truth. Coke bores me, It bores us all. We're jaded cunts, in a scene we hate, a city we hate, pretending that we're at the center of the universe, trashing ourselves with crap drugs to stave off the feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, aware that all we're doing is feeding that paranoia and disenchantment, yet somehow we're too apathetic to stop. Cause, sadly, there's nothing else of interest to stop for.
Irvine Welsh
So they watch over us like gods of old. Our patron sinners.
Hal Duncan
Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set.
Iain M. Banks
The three great elements of modern civilization Gunpowder Printing and the Protestant Religion.
Thomas Carlyle
The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts.
John Muir
The power of the artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, a form concerned with argument and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone-and you'll be made shinier, brighter, by it. In this form it will-and therefore you will-avoid destruction by war, history, time generally; it'll even keep you alive after death; in fact it'll form a place for you to live, not die, where you'll be seen in the eyes of and the context of this love right to the end of time.
Ali Smith
A chap’s impending death has a way of focusing the mind.
Sara Sheridan
There’s nothing like a military man, even out of uniform.
Sara Sheridan
The Father is truly the only Promise Maker who is in earnest a Promise Keeper. A promise from God is a promise kept.
Sheila Walsh
An intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils".
Robert Louis Stevenson
Even the incorruptible are corruptible if they cannot accept the possibility of being mistaken.Infallibility is a sin in any man.All laws can be broken and are.Often.
Craig Ferguson
Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)
Gilbert Highet
It's always the same with lost people; you start out looking for them, and you end up losing yourself.
Grant Morrison
A flock of small birds took off from the wall of the fort. They moved like a length of dark silk caught by the breeze as they headed out to sea. Behind them, the sky was the colour of forget-me-nots. The sun blazed.
Sara Sheridan
Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry'd one step further, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv'd, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc'd to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both.
David Hume
Be careful that you don't become a hypocrite by spending all your time trying to get others right with God before you worship Him yourself.
Oswald Chambers
If I have a near-beer, I’m near beer. And if I’m near beer, I’m close to tequila. And if I’m close to tequila, I’m adjacent to cocaine.
Craig Ferguson
Do not have as your motive the desire to be known as a praying man. Get an inner chamber in which to pray where no one knows you are praying shut the door and talk to God in secret.
Oswald Chambers
It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.
George MacDonald
English is so past,’ she said. ‘Sure, we need people who can write about what we do, but they don’t have to be English graduates. Theology graduates who don’t believe any of it – that would be useful.
Ken MacLeod
The instant is not in time -- time is in the instant.
John Barbour
When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.
Sara Sheridan
Aunts offer kids an opportunity to try out ideas that don't chime with their parents and they also demonstrate that people can get on, love each other and live together without necessarily being carbon copies.
Sara Sheridan
The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.
George MacDonald
To see her is to love her And love but her forever For Nature made her what she is And never made another.
Robert Burns
All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was.
Iain Banks
I got interested in the idea that love is often used as a kind of blanket explanation for things. I mean, battered wives, for instance: "Why did you go back to him?" "Oh, I loved him." "Why did you embezzle fifteen million pounds and run away to the other side of the world?" "Oh, well, because I was in love." All that and then you don't ask anything else. I thought if I just say, these people needed love and they found it, then it kind of explained it away. I wanted to look at their behaviour and how love can inspire the best and the very worst in human behaviour but love itself is not behaviour. So I avoided the word 'love' until the very end and it's the last word in the novel. I wanted to explore what people will do when they're in such terrible need of love. If there was a big idea then that was it. Then, of course, I hope that if it's a story worth reading it's the characters themselves who make you want to read it, not the big idea. I don't think a big idea drives a novel usually. Something else has to engage you on a much more kind of personal level.
Morag Joss
I need you because I'm in love with you, Eden, and I have no idea how I'll ever get over you.
Estelle Maskame
Sleep Silence's child sweet father of soft rest Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings Indifferent host to shepherds and kings Sole comforter to minds with grief oppressed.
William Drummond
Seeing is not believing, it is only seeing,”George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin
George MacDonald
Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.
Iain Banks
Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?
Iain Banks
MortalityOh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,He passes from life to his rest in the grave.The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,Be scattered around, and together be laid;And the young and the old, the low and the high,Shall molder to dust, and together shall lie.Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,Are mingled together in sunshine and rain;And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge,Still follow each other, like surge upon surge.'Tis the wink of an eye - 'tis the draught of a breath -From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroudOh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
William Knox
What happiness is there which is not purchased with more or less of pain?
Margaret Oliphant
As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy.
George MacDonald
On of the prerequisites for my mobile phone is that I have to be able to fling it at a wall if I lose my temper.
Sara Sheridan
Instinct is untaught ability.
Alexander Bain
I stroke a finger over my own top button, undo it, then let my hand drop with an exaggerated sigh. "It's not quite the same," I declare, "ripping my own clothes off.
Kate Tough
You will know as much of God, and only as much of God, as you are willing to put into practice.
Eric Liddell
Nothing is interesting if you're not interested.
Helen Maclnness
There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool.
George MacDonald
God did not direct His call to Isaiah— Isaiah overheard God saying, ". . . who will go for Us?" The call of God is not just for a select few but for everyone. Whether I hear God’s call or not depends on the condition of my ears, and exactly what I hear depends upon my spiritual attitude.
Oswald Chambers
I am apt, however, to entertain a Suspicion, that the World is still too young to fix any general stable Truths in Politics, which will remain true to the latest Posterity. We have not as yet had Experience of above three thousand Years; so that not only the Art of Reasoning is still defective in this Science, as well as in all others, but we even want sufficient Materials, upon which we can reason. 'Tis not sufficiently known, what Degrees of Refinement, either in Virtue or Vice, human Nature is susceptible of; nor what may be expected of Mankind from any great Revolution in their Education, Customs, or Principles.
David Hume
it is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no sea’s repose; I pass from waking agonies… to the semiconscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know only that the nerves scream, the body aches, and there is no one to turn crying to for comfort.
Iain Banks
I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being _desillusionnes_, for they have never been illuded. They look up each to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real.
George MacDonald
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
John Muir