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Famous Nan Shepherd Quotes

“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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