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AllAberdeenshireGarry ForbesMartha IronsideNatureImaginationKnowledgeMountainScotlandSpringUnderstanding

Famous Nan Shepherd Quotes

“Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain - eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. The reason for their swiftness is severely practical: food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain's own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is - if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function - so much the more is the mountain's integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.”

NatureImaginationBeautyMovementMountainWildlifeNecessity
Book:The Living Mountain
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“The clear water was at our knees, then at our thighs. How clear it was only this walking into it could reveal. To look through it was to discover its own properties. What we saw under water had a sharper clarity than what we saw through air. We waded on into the brightness, and the width of the water increased, as it always does when one is on or in it, so that the loch no longer seemed narrow, but the far side was a long way off. Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped. We were standing on the edge of a shelf that ran some yards into the loch before plunging down to the pit that is the true bottom. And through that inordinate clearness we saw to the depths of the pit. So limpid was it that every stone was clear.”

MindBodyUnderstandingWaterNature Philosophy
Book:The Living Mountain
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“Martha Ironside was nine years old when she kicked her great-aunt Josephine. At nineteen she loved the old lady, idly perhaps, in her natural humour, as she loved the sky and space. At twenty-four, when Miss Josephine Leggatt died, aged seventy-nine and reluctant, Martha knew that it she who had taught her wisdom; thereby proving - she reflected - that man does not learn from books alone; because Martha had kicked Aunt Josephine (at the age of nine) for taking her from her books.”

WisdomLearningBooksMartha IronsideAunt Josephine
Book:The Quarry Wood
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“The grey Crown, that had soared through so many generations above the surge and excitement of youth, had told her that wisdom is patient and waits for its people. The greed went out of her as she looked up morning after morning at its serenity. It was like a great rock amid the changing tides of men's opinions. Knowledge alters - wisom is stable. It told her time and again that there is no need for haste. In the long Library, too, with the coloured light filtering through it's great window, and its dim recesses among the laden shelves - where thought, the enquiring experiencing spirit, the essence of man's long tussle with his destiny, was captured and preserved: a dessicated powder, dusted across inumerable leaves, and set free, volatile, live spirit again at the touch of a living mind - she learned to be quiet.”

WisdomKnowledgePatienceUniversity Of Aberdeen
Book:The Quarry Wood
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“A blue April morning, the shimmer of light, a breath, a passing air, and it was no longer a harsh and stubborn country, its hard-won fields beleaguered by moor and whin, its stones heaped together in dyke and cairn, marking the land like lines upon a weathered countenance, whose past must stay upon it to the end; but a dream, willing men's hearts. In the sun the leafless boughs were gleaming. Birches were like tangles of shining hair; or rather, he thought, insubstantial, floating like shredded light above the soil. Below the hills blue floated in the hollows, all but tangible, like a distillation that light had set free from the earth; and on a rowan tree in early leaf, its boughs blotted against the background, the tender leaves, like flakes of green fire, floated too, the wild burning life of spring loosened from earth's control. On every side, earth was transmuted. Scents floated, the subtle life released ftom earth and assailing the pulses. Song floated. This dour and thankless country, this land that grat a' winter and girned a' summer could change before one's eyes to an elfin and enchanted radiance, could look, by some rare miracle of light or moisture, essentialised.”

SpringAprilRowanAberdeenshireGarry ForbesBirches
Book:The Weatherhouse
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“This place is dead,' he thought. The world he had come from was alive. Its incessant din, the movement, the vibration that never ceased from end to end of the war-swept territory, were earnest of a human activity so enormous that the mind spun with thinking of it. Over there one felt oneself part of something big. One was making the earth. Here there were men, no doubt, leading their hapless, misdirected, individual lives; but they were a people unaware, out of it. He felt almost angry that Lindsay should be dwelling among them. He knew from her letters that she was in Fetter-Rothnie, and, convalescent, had written her that he would come to Knapperley; but that her young fervour should be shut in this dead world annoyed him. She was too far from life. The reconstruction of the universe would not begin in this dark hole, inhabited by old wives and ploughmen.”

ReconstructionFirst World WarAberdeenshireWestern FrontGarry ForbesFetter RothnieLindsay Lorimer
Book:The Weatherhouse
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“Life recommenced. Dogs barked, cocks crew, smoke rose, men shouted, women clattered their milk pails. Soon figures moved upon the empty fields. Somewhere a plough was creaking. Garry turned turned his head towards the noise and searched the brown earth until he saw the team. Seagulls were crying after it, settling in the black furrow, rising again to wheel around the horses. As he watched, the sun reached the field. The wet new-turned furrow was touched to light as though a line of fire had run along it. The flanks of the horses gleamed. They tossed their manes, lifting their arched necks and bowing again to the pull: brown farm horses, white nosed, white-footed, stalwart and unhurrying as the earth they trampled or the man who held the share.”

MorningHorsesPloughingAberdeenshireSeagullsGarry Forbes
Book:The Weatherhouse
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“Around him he noted that the woods were flaming. A fine flame was playing over the leafless branches, not gaudy like the fires of autumn, but strong and pure. The trees,not now by accident of life but in themselves, were again etherialised. For a brief space, in spring, before the leaf comes, the life in trees is like a pure and subtle fire, in buds and boughs. Willows are like yellow rods of fire, blood-red burns in sycamore and scales off in floating flakes as the bud unfolds and the sheath is loosened. Beeches and elms, all dull beneath, have webs of golden and purple brown upon their spreading tops. Purple blazes in the birch twigs and smoulders darkly in the blossom of the ash. At no other season are the trees so liitle earthly. Mere vegetable matter they are not. One understands the dryad myth, both the emergence of the vivid delicate creature and her melting again in her tree; for in a week, a day, the foliage thickens, she is a tree again.”

SpringTreesFoliageWillowAberdeenshireDryadBudsGarry ForbesBirchSycamore
Book:The Weatherhouse
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“Ach!" cried Emmeline impatiently, "you had aye a saft side to Madge. Onybody wi' their twa een in their heid cud a' seen the road she was like to tak. Wi' her palaverin' an' her pooderin' an' her this an' that. She had a' her orders, had Madge. An' a stink o scent 'at wad knock ye doon. Foozlin' her face wi' pooders. Eneuch to pit faces ooten fashion. I wadna be seen ga'in' the length o' masel wi' a face like yon. A wadna ging the midden sic a sicht.”

MakeupScentScots LanguageMadge
Book:The Quarry Wood
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“Martha said it over and over to herself: "Scotland is bounded on the south by England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the Arory-bory-Alice, and on the west by Eternity." ...She repeated the boundaries of Scotland with the same satisfaction as she repeated the rivers of Spain. Up to her University days she carried the conviction that there was something about Scotland in the Bible.”

EternityScotlandRising SunAurora BorealisMartha Ironside
Book:The Quarry Wood
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“But oftner the nights were clear, marvellously lit. Darkness was a pale lustrous gloom. Sometimes the north was silver clear, so luminous that through the filigree of leaf and sapling its glow pierced burning, as though the light were a patterned loveliness standing out against the background of the trees. Later the glow dulled and the trees became the pattern against the background of the light. The hushed world took her in. Tranqil, surrendered, she became one with the vast quiet night. A puddock sprawled noiselessly towards her, a bat swooped, tracing gigantic patterns upon the sky, a corncrake scraighed, on and on through the night, monotonous and forgotten as one forgets the monotony of the sea's roar; and when the soft wind was in the south-west, the sound of the river, running among its stony rapids below the ferry, floated up and over her like a tide. She fell asleep to its running and wakened to listen for it; and heard it as one hears the breathing of another.”

Summer NightsBatAberdeenshireMartha IronsidePuddockCorncraikRiver Dee
Book:The Quarry Wood
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“But at the end of February, out of a cold black north a dozen meandering snowflakes fell. They drifted about the air like thrums - blown from the raw edges of the coming storm. Next morning, colour had gone from the world. Shapes, sounds, the energies and acuteness of life, were muffled in the dull white that covered both earth and sky. No sun came through. The weeks dragged on with no lifting of the pallor. The snow melted a little and froze again with smears of dirt marbelling its surfaces. To the northward of the dykes it was lumped in obstinate seams, at the cottage doors trodden and caked, matted with refuse, straws and stones and clots of dung carried in about on clorted boots. The ploughs lay idle, gaunt, like half-sunk among the furrows.”

WinterSnowFebruaryAberdeenshire
Book:The Quarry Wood
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“Alexander Kilgour, in true Scottish style, was educated for the Church. At thirty-five he filled a Chair of Divinity. Two members of his Presbytery, before his appointment, were overheard to say, 'We don't want Kilgour of Inverald - he has far too acute a mind for a Professor.' And indeed Alexander, in a short while, had a wasps' bike about his ears. 'As bad as Smith o' Aiberdeen,' cried the critics. Alexander Kilgour, however, had not only the advantage of teaching ten years later than Robertson Smith, he had also the Kilgour habit of success in all he put his hand to. He retained his Chair, silenced the mutterers by tact and suavity, and gave width of outlook to a succession of young Scottish divines. His urbane persuasiveness of manner, however, covered a true prophetic zeal. He was passionate for enlightenment, drunk on the word: though in this matter too the pre-war whiskies were the best. The ageing man would sit with brooding brows over the later distilations.”

DivinityChurch Of ScotlandPresbyterianismAlexander KilgourWilliam Robertson Smith
Book:The Grampian Quartet: The Quarry Wood: The Weatherhouse: A Pass in the Grampians: The Living Mountain
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