Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 18

No one could say the stories were uselessfor as the tongue clackedfive or forty fingers stitchedcorn was grated from the huskpathwork was piecedor the darning was done...(from 'The Storyteller Poems')
Liz Lochhead
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us. It wad frae money a blunder free us And foolish notion.
Robert Burns
I think comedy as an art involves the audience as a participant as much as is involves the artist.
Craig Ferguson
Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.
Thomas Carlyle
Experience can never be undone, or knowledge unlearned.
Ronald Frame
Lark’s SongThat child who from Diana’s thought is bornA huntress swift, who doth the world adornWith strength and passion worthy of the GreenMay wax, and one day rise to be a queen.That child who in the eye of Phoebus growsOf visage fair, that none would dare opposeMay in her hand hold light and glory too,And to the Light hold sternly staunch and true.That child who with the face of Venus smiles,Will bear a heart of mischief and of wiles,And may in time love’s faithful bonds fulfilWhile bending lesser hearts unto her will.That child who with Athena’s grace doth moveMay to all eyes her worldly wisdom proveAnd make right wise and fulsome use thereofTo measure all who seek to win her love.That child who with grim Circe’s tongue foretells Enmeshing faithful hearts within her spellsBy dint of sly mendacity and guile,All innocence and virtue may defile.That child who by her cunning doth conniveMay by fair Tyche’s fortune wax and thriveAnd come in time to sit upon a throne;Or fail and fall, forsaken and alone.That child may choose to hark to glory’s callAnd shine in splendour, loved by one and all;Or cleave to darkness, hated and reviled:Chance crafts the fate of every fate-touched child.
D. Alexander Neill
Google maps are one thing but there's no substitute for pounding the beat and I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to break into the back of the houses on Belgrave Place. Once I even for followed by a suspicious householder - I'd been hanging around staring at the exterior of his flat for too long.
Sara Sheridan
I was used to heat but this place was so dry the trees were bribing the dogs.
Irvine Welsh
Temptation rarely comes in working hours. It is in their leisure time that men are made or marred.
W. M. Taylor
In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest. Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
Adam Smith
I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.
Sara Sheridan
Macdonald's Law: Never write a letter if you can help it and never destroy one.
John A. Macdonald
The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.
Bill Copeland
Nothing is pure and entire of a piece. All advantages are attended with disadvantages. A universal compensation prevails in all conditions of being and existence.
David Hume
Through silent alleys where dark shadows fleeted past them like forest beasts on the prowl; through bustling market-places where bloaters predominated, into crammed gin-palaces where the gas flashed over faces whereon was stamped the indelible impression of a protest against creation; brushing tatters which were in gruesome harmony with the haggard or bloated features.("The Phantom Model
Hume Nisbet
They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright!
James Drummond Burns
There were times when he felt as if he were being literally torn in two. Times when he raged at the injustice of what was happening to him, times when he was overwhelmed with guilt. There was no right and wrong anymore, which had been one of clear-cut lines for so long, was now so blurred that he was careening around like a compass struggling to find true north.
Marguerite Kaye
Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.
Sara Sheridan
The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.
Sara Sheridan
Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it listed went out a sigh of thanksgiving. At last I was! I lived, and nothing could touch my life! My darling walked beside me, and we were on our way home to see the Father!
George MacDonald
Seeds of doubt, once planted, will grow.
Lesley Lokko
Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars above, the place felt like a bright secret – something ancient and precious.
Sara Sheridan
Democracy or reading, democracy of space: our public library tradition, wherever we live in the wide world, was incredibly hard-won for us by the generations before us and ought to be protected, not just for ourselves but in the name of every generation after us.
Ali Smith
Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled Scots wham Bruce has aften led Welcome to your gory bed Or to victorie.
Robert Burns
He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life. But he really looked like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life.
Ali Smith
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
John Muir
There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst--symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus--this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace--this live thing which, if I might, I would have running through my room, yea, babbling along my table--this water is its own self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God.
George MacDonald
Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.
John Muir
The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbours on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression.
Iain Banks
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive and the true success is to labour.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Health is the vital principle of bliss.
James Thomson
Of a truth men are mystically united: a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.
Thomas Carlyle
Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.
Henry Home
Love is not maximum emotion. Love is maximum commitment.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We've spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war.
Iain M. Banks
A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.
Sara Sheridan
I won`t buy into the Hollywood thing...I want to be in good movies.
Ewan McGregor
The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.
Oswald Chambers
The life of faith is not a life of mounting up with wings, but a life of walking and not fainting.
Oswald Chambers
I will place no value on anything I have or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom of Christ. If anything will advance the interests of that kingdom, it shall be given away or kept, only as by giving or keeping it I shall most promote the glory ofHim to whom I owe all my hopes in time and eternity.
Robert Moffat
Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)
Alexander Smith
A vision is best presented as a story that people can relate to.
Jim Kerr
Going to the woods is going home.
John Muir
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.
George MacDonald
After all this time I found that the novel is in fact punk rock.
Craig Ferguson
It's gonna take me a lot longer than a year without you to get over you.
Estelle Maskame
The mass communications that could enable our politics for good have instead turned it into a bland conglomeration of stinted opinion cloaked in the occasional media frenzy of blame or denial.
Sara Sheridan
Old people really do have a secret though. You wanna know what it is? Luck.
Craig Ferguson
It is just the old way--that of obedience. If you have ever seen the Lord, if only from afar--if you have any vaguest suspicion that the Jew Jesus, who professed to have come from God, was a better man, a different man--one of your first duties must be to open your ears to His words and see whether they seem to you to be true. Then, if they do, to obey them with your whole strength and might. This is the way of life, which will lead a man out of its miseries into life indeed.
George MacDonald
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny after ward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Old is the tree and the fruit good,Very old and thick the wood.Woodman, is your courage stout?Beware! the root is wrapped aboutYour mother's heart, your father's bones;And like the mandrake comes with groans.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I got married because I fell in love with this woman. I had a baby with her because we wanted to have children. But that's not because of some philosophical ideal at all, no.
Ewan McGregor
I once was a stranger to grace and to God,I knew not my danger, and felt not my load;Though friends spoke in rapture of Christ on the tree,Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me.I oft read with pleasure, to sooth or engage,Isaiah’s wild measure and John’s simple page;But e’en when they pictured the blood sprinkled treeJehovah Tsidkenu seemed nothing to me.Like tears from the daughters of Zion that roll,I wept when the waters went over His soul;Yet thought not that my sins had nailed to the treeJehovah Tsidkenu—’twas nothing to me.When free grace awoke me, by light from on high,Then legal fears shook me, I trembled to die;No refuge, no safety in self could I see—Jehovah Tsidkenu my Saviour must be.My terrors all vanished before the sweet Name;My guilty fears banished, with boldness I cameTo drink at the fountain, life giving and free—Jehovah Tsidkenu is all things to me.Jehovah Tsidkenu! my treasure and boast,Jehovah Tsidkenu! I ne’er can be lost;In Thee I shall conquer by flood and by field,My cable, my anchor, my breast-plate and shield! Even treading the valley, the shadow of death,This “watchword” shall rally my faltering breath;For while from life’s fever my God sets me free,Jehovah Tsidkenu, my death song shall be.
Robert Murray McCheyne
There was something unbearable about the damp, dark earth closing over a coffin and the still, empty flesh that was inside. She had attended a hundred funerals, but when you really loved someone there was something too final about a burial. Something brutal.
Sara Sheridan
If you wish to preserve your secret wrap it up in frankness.
Alexander Smith
I love writing, and just as much, I love undertaking research.
Sara Sheridan
Thus unto winter’s chill embrace I turnWho once the summer’s sun did blithely bide ‘Neath solemn visage cold and fair and sternIn her cool breast my hot heart to confide.Denied the warmth and wit of summer’s sun Or springtime’s strength, and bright, melodious song I dreamed not to complete what I’d begun Nor dared to haste the laggard hours along.But now with spring and summer sun at rest Laid bare before bright winter’s pale charms I would for love of her lay down my quest And take my ease in Winter-Lady’s arms.Before her beauty fair ‘neath snow-swept sky All other seasons blanch and fade, and die.- The Lost Knight's Lament, "Winter's Lady" (Forthcoming)
D. Alexander Neill
It is terrifyingly beautiful," Julia said softly.t"Terrifying?"t"Nature at its most beautiful and most lethal. It is like standing on the edge of one of those lakes in Switzerland, so blue and so calm and so deep and so dangerous. You have the overwhelming urge to plunge in, even though you know the cold will kill you. This desert - your desert - it makes me want to walk into it and keep walking. You probably think I'm being ridiculously fanciful."t"I would not have put it in those words, but they are exactly how I feel about Qaryma. Terrifyingly beautiful.
Marguerite Kaye
Carlyle's genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Balliol, we believe that 'no English writer has done more to elevate and purify our ideas of life and to make us conscious that the things of the spirit are real, and that in the last resort there is no other reality.
Hector Carsewell Macpherson
Sin is too great an evil for man to meddle with. His attempts to remove it do but increase it, and his endeavours to approach God in spite of it aggravate his guilt.
Horatius Bonar