Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 15

You couldn’t predict what was going to happen for one simple reason: people.
Sara Sheridan
I have a deep and profound mistrust of all politicians.
Craig Ferguson
In that time while he was still aware, which was the worse, I wonder: the agony of his physical torture or the horror of their utter hatred, of their moral certainty that he was so beyond the bounds of what they could accept that he deserved not just a death but one of such brutality, such inhumanity, as would make the seraphs who burned Sodom bow their heads in cold respect? What is it like, I wonder, to learn the full capacity of hatred in a lesson hammered home with bone broken on wood and skin ripped on barbed wire?
Hal Duncan
And then the blue eyes, with gentleness, scanned all her new-made body and came to rest on her eyes. 'I have begun to eat,' said Francis Crawford. 'And I have begun to slake my thirst. But in you I have found a banquet under the heavens that will serve me for ever.
Dorothy Dunnett
No one's book is perfect.
Sara Sheridan
There is something in human pride that can stand big troubles, but we need the supernatural grace and power of God to stand by us in the little things. The tiniest detail in which we obey has all the omnipotent power of the grace of God behind it. When we do our duty, not for duty’s sake, but because we believe that God is engineering our circumstances in that way, then at the very point of our obedience the whole superb grace of God is ours.
Oswald Chambers
History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Gie me a spark o' nature's fire that's a' the learning I desire.
Robert Burns
They march into the future to the rhythm of the past.
Sara Sheridan
Valentine WeatherKiss me with rain on your eyelashes,come on, let us sway together,under the trees, and to hell with thunder.
Edwin Morgan
The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change of perpetual flux.
Sir James Frazer
There is a great deal in choosing colours that go well with one's complexion. People think of that for their dresses, but not for their rooms., which are of so much more importance. I should have liked blue, but blue gets so soon tawdry. I think, (...) that I have enough complexion at present to venture upon a pale spring green.
Mrs. Oliphant
It must be understood that in some cases the process by which a god or goddess degenerates into a fairy may occupy centuries, and that in the passage of generations such an alteration may be brought about in appearance and traits as to make it seem impossible that any relationship actually exists between the old form and the new. This may be accounted for by the circumstance that in gradually assuming the traits of fairyhood the god or goddess may also have taken on the characteristics of fairies which Already existed in the minds of the folk, the elves of a past age, who were already elves at a period when he or she still flourished in the full vigour of godhead. For in one sense Faerie represents a species of limbo, a great abyss of traditional material, into which every kind of ancient belief came to be cast as the acceptance of one new faith after another dictated the abandonment of forms and ideas unacceptable to its doctrines. The difference between god and fairy is indeed the difference between religion and folk-lore.
Lewis Spence
Beside her I felt grey, like she had all the colours I'd ever need.
Daniela Sacerdoti
No good ever comes of pride, for it is the meanest of mean things, and no one but he who is full of it thinks it grand.
George MacDonald
We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.
Sara Sheridan
Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There's something very... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You've never changed sex, have you?' He shook his head. 'Or slept with a man?' Another shake. 'I thought so,' Yay said. 'You're strange, Gurgeh.' She drained her glass.
Iain Banks
We were perfectly decorous together. It took the will of both of us. I trusted him with me, and myself with him.
Ronald Frame
I likes me some ‘Shit Blows Up’ fiction, don’t get me wrong.
Hal Duncan
The purpose of prayer is that we get ahold of God, not of the answer.
Oswald Chambers
Anything could happen in the company of a woman whose usual status is ‘apparition’.
Margot McCuaig
I was overcome by a wave of wonder at how much good was going on, and how you heard about the bad things that happened so much that you overlooked the immensely disproportionate majority of other acts done to the real benefit of self and others without which none of this would be here at all.
Ken MacLeod
Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his life-time for the good of the community.
Andrew Carnegie
The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently but to live manfully.
Thomas Carlyle
While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things,The fate of empires and the fall of kings;While quacks of State must each produce his plan,And even children lisp the Rights of Man;Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,The Rights of Woman merit some attention.
Robert Burns
It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn’t matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book – word by word – or crossing a country – step by step – each minute had to be lived moment by moment.
Sara Sheridan
I was a couple of summers past twenty but I felt there were stones under that frozen, dun earth that were younger than me.
Robert Low
Go where thou wilt, thou canst not go out of thy Father's ground.
Thomas Boston
She would be one of those who kneel to their own shadows till feet grow on their knees; then go down on their hands till their hands grow into feet; then lay their faces on the ground till they grow into snouts; when at last they are a hideous sort of lizards, each of which believes himself the best, wisest, and loveliest being in the world, yea, the very centre of the universe. And so they run about for ever looking for their own shadows that they may worship them, and miserable because they cannot find them, being themselves too near the ground to have any shadows; and what becomes of them at last, there is but one who knows.
George MacDonald
The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Obedience is the opener of eyes.
George MacDonald
I tried talking to Jesus, but he just put me on hold...
Colin Hay
Escape is a commodity like anything else
Iain Banks
In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into.
Sara Sheridan
My love is like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June: My love is like the melody That's sweetly played in tune. How fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in love am I; And I will love thee still, my dear, Till all the seas gang dry. Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt with the sun;I will love thee still, my dear, While the sands of life shall run. And fare thee weel, my only love. And fare thee weel awhile! And I will come again, my love, Though it were ten thousand mile.
Robert Burns
God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.
Sir James M. Barrie
I am always hearing. . . the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.''No it wouldn't,' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.''But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries. . . . It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest.
George MacDonald
Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore And coming events cast their shadows before.
Thomas Campbell
Some hae meat and canna eat And some wad eat that want it But we hae meat and we can eat And sae the Lord be thankit.
James Drummond Burns
the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time
Sir James Hall
It's part of a writer's job to be nosy about everything.
Sara Sheridan
When fate hands us a lemon, let's try to make lemonade.
Andrew Carnegie
The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop.
George MacDonald
The point is: what happens in heaven?''Unknowable wonderfulness?' 'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.''If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don't have life after death; you just have death.
Iain M. Banks
There was a time—until very recently in the scheme of things—when there were no wild animals, because every animal was wild; and humans were few. Animals, and animal presence over us and around us. Over every horizon, animals. Their skins clothing our skins, their fats in our lamps, their bladders to carry water, meat when we could get it.
Kathleen Jamie
The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.
James Beattie
There are as many kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end.
George MacDonald
in a few moments he came into the core of himself, where he was alone, and felt strangely companioned, not by anyone or anything, but by himself. The rejected self found refuge here, not a cowed refuge, but somehow a wandering ease; as if it were indestructible, and had its own final pride, its own secret eyes.
Neil M. Gunn
One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.
Iain Banks
Whenever we put other things first, there is confusion.
Oswald Chambers
Satan takes occasion of the frailty of the bodily temple and says, 'Now you know you cannot do that; you are so infirm, you cannot concentrate your mind,' etc. Never allow bodily infirmities to hinder you obeying the commands of Jesus.
Oswald Chambers
Landscape is my religion....God in a green legend, I lean over the poolIn a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branchesAnd floored with a skin of water.
Norman MacCaig
Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
John Muir
I didn't want to take it. I knew it was a powerful drug, but I also knew it was a catabolic drug that consumed the body.
David Millar
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
Iain M. Banks
People didn't really like McDonald's, same as her mum didn't really like Catholicism, but when you were new in town, at least it was a known quantity. So that'll be a Quarter-Pounder and a Communion Wafer meal-deal to go.
Christopher Brookmyre
If there is any societyamong robbers and murderers, they must at least. . . .abstainfrom robbing and murdering one another. So beneficenceis less essential than justice is to the existence of society; alack of beneficence will make a society uncomfortable, butthe prevalence of injustice will utterly destroy it.
Adam Smith
I like football. I find its an exciting strategic game. Its a great way to avoid conversation with your family at Thanksgiving.
Craig Ferguson
Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come that we may be brave in peril constant in tribulation temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death loyal and loving one to anther.
Robert Louis Stevenson