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Highlands Quotes

Browse 28 quotes about Highlands.

Highlands Quotes

“the old house, in the lee of the hills, surrounded by relics of the old powder mill. the ancient stones silent, the water wheels still, but yet there is life in the ruins of the mill. the birds and the sheep find shelter to sleep the fisherman fish in the river so deep. the flowers of the forest carpet the glades. and the frogs they are leaping down in the lades. laughter bygone forever is still yet the echoes still linger here in the mill. voices come whispering from the century that was and dash is just resting under the moss. on nights of bright moon flooding over the hill I sense the life breathing here, in the mill. and here in the house time beats gently past as it has done before and will to the last.”

AutobiographyCountry LifeHighlandsCottagecore
Book:Green Are My Mountains
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“Glancing down, Meg saw his eyes trained on her finger. “The ring? It’s been in my family for generations. I recently inherited it.” Meg dropped her eyes at the thought of her Aunt Gilly. The note that had come with the ring was written by Gilly’s own hand. It had said that her “destiny awaited,” whatever that meant. “Is it you?” His softly voiced question brought her gaze to his.”

RomanceHighlanders RomanceHighlandsLaura HunsakerAmethyst HeatAmethystringDestiny Awaited
Book:Amethyst Heat
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“The carriage drove smoothly along, and the sound of the church bell fell at intervals on the ear, 'in cadence sweet, now dying away'; and, at the holy sound, Mary's heart flew back to the peaceful vale and primitive kirk at Lochmarlie, where all her happy sabbaths had been spent. The view now opened on the villiage church, beautifully situated on the slope of a green hill. Parties of struggling villagers, in their holiday suits, were descried in all directions, some already assembled in the church-yard, others traversing the neat foot-paths that led through the meadows. But, to Mary's eyes, the well dressed English rustic, trudging along the smooth path, was a far less picturesque object, than the bare-footed Highland girl, bounding over trackless heath-covered hills; and the well-preserved glossy blue coat, seemed a poor substitute for the varied drapery of the graceful plaid.”

ChurchEnglandAssociationSabbathPicturesqueRusticHighlandsPlaidVillagersLochmarlie
Book:Marriage
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“As Smollett relates, Dumbarton has always sat on the edge of something. Historically, it has marked the line between the Romans and Picts, between the Picts and Britons, and between Highlands and Lowlands. The area has been a geographic, social, cultural, linguistic, agricultural and economic border zone for millennia. This liminal status seems to fascinate Smollett, and he returns to it again and again in his writing.”

RomansBorderHighlandsPictsLowlandsDumbartonTobias Smollett
Book:The Scottish Enlightenment: Human Nature, Social Theory and Moral Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Berry
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“Here I first mounted a little Highland steed; and if there had been many spectators, should have been somewhat ashamed of my figure in the march. The horses of the Islands, as of other barren countries, are very low: they are indeed musculous and strong, beyond what their size gives reason for expecting; but a bulky man upon one of their backs makes a very disproportionate appearance.”

ScotlandHorsesHighlandsHebrides
Book:A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
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“The Hotel dining-room, like most of the others I was to find in the Highlands, had its walls covered with pictures of all sorts of wild game, living or in the various postures of death that are produced by sport. Between these pictures the walls were alert with the stuffed heads of deer, furnished with antlers of every degree of magnificence. A friend of mine has a theory that these pictures of dying birds and wounded beasts are intended to whet the diner's appetite, and perhaps they did in the more lusty age of Victoria; but I found they had the opposite effect on me, and had to keep my eyes from straying too often to them. In one particular hotel this idea was carried out with such thoroughness that the walls of its dining room looked like a shambles, they presented such an overwhelming array of bleeding birds, beasts and fishes. To find these abominations on the walls of Highland hotels, among a people of such delicacy in other things, is peculiarly revolting, and rubs in with superfluous force that this is a land whose main contemporary industry is the shooting down of wild creatures; not production of any kind but wholesale destruction. This state of things is not the fault of the Highlanders, but of the people who have bought their country and come to it chiefly to kill various forms of life.”

ShootingScotlandVictorian EraHighlandsSporting EstatesHighland HotelsWild Game
Book:Scottish Journey
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“Here, if nowhere else in the land, the sense of satiety is unknown; and it is to this mental tonic, even more than to the bracing air of the heights, that we owe the unwearied spirit which nerves us to walk more leagues upon the mountains than we could walk miles upon the plain. For in the lowlands we walk with the body only; in the highlands we walk with the mind”

MountainsWalkHighlands
Book:On Cambrian and Cumbrian Hills: Pilgrimages to Snowdon and Scafell
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“Nursed in poverty he acquired a hardihood which enabled him to sustain severe privations. As the simplicity of his life gave vigour to his body, so it fortified his mind. Possessing a frame and constitution thus hardened he was taught to consider courage as the most honourable virtue, cowardice the most disgraceful failing.”

HighlandsHighlanders
Book:Sketches of the Character, Institutions and Customs of the Highlanders of Scotland
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“The attempt to separate Lowland from Highland Scotland ignores the extent to which Lowland Scots are the descendants of Highlanders, and how many Lowland Scots, like Nan Shepherd, made the country's mountains the focus of their spiritual aspirations. 'Highlandism' is not simply the ersatz adoption of a stereotypical version of Scottish culture which is entirely unconnected with the reality of modern Scottish life: the Highlands are both the geographical and the historical backdrop with which 'Lowland' Scottish culture interacts.”

HighlandsScottish CultureLowlands
Book:The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence
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“In a flash it came to me - might not people who were forced to spend their working hours between walls like to hear about what went on in a hill-top croft, of how it was possible to get an immense amount of fun and satisfaction out of lifting loads of mud into a cart, even though your boots were leaking and you knew there was not enough in the kitty to buy another pair? Would they like to know about the way light could stream down a blue hillside on a spring noon, how a lark could suddenly leap into a pale, washed skye after a night of storm and make the air ring with song, of how it was possible to get by every sort of difficulty as long as there was this knowledge that you were all in it together, this solidarity with rock and sun and bird? I believed they would.”

InspirationalHighlandsCroftRural Living
Book:A Croft in the Hills
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“The pipe-music filled the room with sound, until it seemed that the throbbing walls must burst asunder- or the very roof of the inn fly off, to release the pressure. The candle-light pranced around the room in a crazy reel of will-o’-the-wisps, distorted by the clouds of dust melting down from the ceiling like Hebridean mist. The Highlanders looked at each other in wild surmise, then started smashing tankards against the walls in time with the swirling strains of music, sending ale cascading up into the air, spattering the ceiling and soaking the revellers’ hair and plaids.”

ScotlandBagpipesHighlands
Book:Tam: The Three Changelings
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“Spring in the hills would confront the greatest artist with too vast a panorama. I doubt if he could ever capture it. For Spring there is more than colour; it is music and scent. The burns literally hum down the hillside, the trees have rhythm in their shaking. The smell of Spring in the hills is a blending of peaty thickness, bracken-mould, flowers' spicyness, and clean, quick purge of the wind. Down in the hollows anemones, bereft of smell, gleam in pale patches.”

SpringtimeHighlands
Book:A Country Dweller's Years: Nature Writings by Jessie Kesson
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“Badenoch encapsulates the dichotomy of the sporting estate. Rich southern incomers provided much-needed income and jobs, a new economic lifeline in difficult times, while at the same time riding roughshod over the last remnants of the traditional farming economy to suit their own interests - another blow to a way of life that had survived and evolved over countless generations.”

ShootingHighlandsBadenochSporting EstatesDeer StalkingFarming EconomyGrouse Shooting
Book:'The People Are Not There': The Transformation of Badenoch 1800 - 1863
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“I would start at 6 a.m. on a six mile walk and a piece of dry oat cake was nearly always eaten before we reached the place selected to commence the day's shooting. The spying, stalking,and chasing would continue until dark. When there was a kill, or chase, we would not get back to the huts before ten or twelve at night, worn out, and so hungry as to be ready to eat anything. After attending to the dogs I had to walk home, a distance of two miles [sometimes not getting to bed till 2:00 a.m.], and next morning at 6 a.m. would be off again with a fresh gentleman.”

ShootingHighlandsSporting EstatesDeer StalkingGlen Feshie
Author:William Collie
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“Scott's description of the stag in The Lady of the Lake, is much more challenging than the image of Landseer's Monarch of the Glen. He refers to the 'antlered monarch of the waste', a far more appropriate creature of the upper reaches of Glen Artney where Canto I of The Lady of the Lake begins. The problem is that Scott and Landseer have become too closely associated; they have become a conjoined stereotype of the Highlands from which neither can escape. That is not such a problem for Landseer; indeed, without his association with Scott he would be much less known today. But it is a problem for Scott and the Highlands, because Landseer's image of The Monarch of the Glen has been visually conflated with Scott's literary work in the minds of so many.”

StereotypeHighlandsWalter ScottStagScottish Highlands RomanceRed DeerThe TrossachsEdwin Landseer
Book:Literary Tourism, the Trossachs and Walter Scott
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