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Quote by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

“With them we may say there died a thing older than themselves, these were the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a song...”

Quote by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

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Sunset Song

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Lewis Grassic Gibbon

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“I told one of the writers that our fields were so nearly vertical that we planted our corn with a shotgun and had to breed a race of mules with legs shorter on one side than the other for plowing. And when he asked how we transported the corn down off the mountain, I said, in a jug. He appeared to believe me, so I was encouraged to go on and tell him that every church in that corner of the state, except our Indian congregation, either conducted services speaking entirely in tongues or else took up serpents as recommended by Jesus. Both the writer and I had taken a few rounds of Scotch at the time. The story appeared as fact in a well-known national periodical, along with the obligatory descriptions of the beauty and ruggedness and unmatched remoteness and mystery of our mountains.”

“Pain anguish and suffering in human life are always in proportion to the strength with which a man is endowed. We will not pretend to say that Heaven always apportions to a man's capability of endurance the anguish with which he afflicts him...Suffering is in proportion to the strength which has been accorded in other words the weak suffer more where the trial is the same than the strong.”

“The maids - by which I mean the long succession of magdalens and half-wits that did the heavy work about the house - lived in one of the back (attic) rooms. Of course it was not considered necessary to give a kitchen wench a decent room - she wasn't accustomed to it and wouldn't have known what to do with it. A creaky bed, a cracked mirror, and a rickety table were all she deserved and all she usually got... a hole into which she could creep at night and which she could emerge at half-past four, eager for another day's work. Now my grandmother was not of that school of thought, but she was not a revolutionary either and, though the maid's room had some amenities such as a wardrobe and a chest of drawers, it was by no means a Paradise in which a lonely girl might be soothed to sweet slumbers. It was long and narrow with a skylight opening on the north. The walls were distempered a cold blue. There the domestics spent their dreary nights diversified with spasms of bucolic love at the week-ends.”

“The etiquette of the bothy and stable was equalled in rigidity only by that of the court of Louis IV. Each man had his place and was taught to keep it. For the second horseman to have gone into supper before the first horseman would have created as much indignation as an infringement of precedence at Versailles. The foreman was always the first to wash his face in the bothy at night; it was he who wound the alarm clock and set it for the morning, and so on and so on. The order of seniority was as strictly observed between the second horseman and the third, while the halflin always got the tarry end of the stick... But the foreman had pride of place in everything. He slept at the front end of the first bed - that is, nearest the fire; he sat at the top of the table in the kitchen; he worked the best pair of horses; and he had the right to make the first pass at the kitchen maid.”

“The Wilders, of course, paid no attention to her exuberance, continuing to live a frugal existence among their pigs and hens, entertained by a self-re-newing circle of farm cats and their preternaturally gifted Airedale terrier, Nero, who would sit politely at the dinner table like a member of the family, eating off his own plate.”