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Scotland Quotes

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Scotland Quotes

“Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorland, of course, vast tracts of brooding landscape under lowering skies, and across this heath strode brooding, lowering men intent on reaching their ancestral houses, where they were going to fling open doors and castigate orphaned yet resolute governesses. Or — preferably — the brooding, lowering men were on horseback, black horses with huge muscled haunches, glistening with sweat —”

HumorFantasyScotlandGothic RomanceJane EyreYorkHeathLiterary Allusions
Book:Case Histories
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“The recognition of the symbolic qualities of enclosure has been significant in re-aligning perceptions of social relations and cultural change in Iron Age societies. Recent work has played down the practical defensive functions of hillforts and stressed their social implications... Hillforts as well as containing settlements, may well have fulfilled social roles not dissimilar to those claimed for stone circles and henges in Neolithic times.”

ScotlandIron AgeHillforts
Book:Scotland After the Ice Age: Environment, Archaeology and History 8000 BC - AD 1000
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“His deep voice drifted to her through the crowd of women. “…my lady when she returns. Och, there ye are, Blossom,” Faolán grinned, standing up and taking her hand so she could ease back into the restaurant booth. “These lasses were just asking if I was a stripper. I told them I doona think so,” he said, his face clouded with uncertainty. “I’m not, am I?” The inquisitive lasses in question flushed scarlet and scattered to the four corners of the room at the murderous look on Colleen’s face. “No, you’re not, but I guess I can see how they’d think that,” she muttered darkly. “What you are is a freaking estrogen magnet.”

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Book:Rogue on the Rollaway
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“Submitted for your approval--the curious case of Colleen O’Brien and the gorgeous time traveling Scot who landed in her living room.” – Rod Serling”

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Book:Rogue on the Rollaway
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“You turn the lights on and off here and if you can’t sleep and want something to read there are books in the living room…” her voice broke off. “Wait. Can you read?” His chin took a slight tilt upward. “Aye,” Faolán replied, his voice cool, “in English, Gaelic, Latin, or French. My Welsh is a bit rusty, and I doona remember any of the Greek I was taught except for words not fit for a lady’s ears. I can also count all the way up to…” He looked down and wiggled his large bare toes, “…twenty.” – Faolán MacIntyre”

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Book:Rogue on the Rollaway
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“Och, lass. Yer going to have to not do that.” Faolán exhaled. “Creeping up on a man is a dangerous thing, and I confess I’m jumpier than most. Yer feet are soft as a cat’s.” “I wasn’t creeping anywhere, I was going to make coffee and this is my house, I’ll creep anywhere I like,” Colleen muttered with a petulant scowl. “But I wasn’t creeping.”

LoveWritingRomanceSexRelationshipsMemoriesDreamsMagicMysteryContemporaryCupsParanormalIrelandFloridaScotlandEroticWitchcraftBloggingPast LifeCelticGoodreadsTarotIrishGaelicRogueBook ReviewsCeltic HeartsRomance Writers Of AmericaShannon MacleodLyrical PressRt Book ReviewsTrs Featured AuthorAstral SexBlog TourRomance Reviews
Book:Rogue on the Rollaway
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“Refusing to lean back against him, Colleen sat ramrod straight until they reached the road. “I guess I should say thank you for saving my life,” she muttered then turned and slapped Faolán hard across the face. “And that’s for you having to save it in the first place. And I’m not your woman, you big, arrogant, lying, betraying…faery loving…” She searched for the perfect insult and couldn’t find one, “…Scot.” She gave a very unladylike snort. “Happy now? That fiery enough for you?”

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Book:Rogue on the Rollaway
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“On the way back, Columba made a little detour. From a mound above the monastery he blessed it and all the people who would in the future come to the island [Iona] for his sake. Then he returned to his cell, not to rest but to go on with his daily stint of copying the scriptures. He was working on the thirty-fourth psalm. He wrote steadily for a while, but when he got to the verse that says, They that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing, he put down his pen. It seemed a perfect place to stop. "I think I can write no more," he said.”

IrelandScotlandSaintsLoch Ness MonsterIonaSt ColumbaColmColumbaPrincess Eithne
Book:Tales of st Columba
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“It must have been soon after that when ways and means were much under discussion that Leslie and Ray came to see us in Wokingham. Leslie was working at high pressure on all sorts of subjects but although he was beginning to find his financial worries lessen he still seemed not to have found and in my opinion did not exactly know what he might be able to do best. I suggested that he wrote a great Scots drama or novel. With one voice Leslie and Ray said it would never pay. I protested that it would if it was good enough - that Scotland was gasping for a picture of the true Scotland as he and I knew it - a picture that was neither A House with the Green Shutters nor yet A Bonnie Briar Bush, neither of which to me rang true.”

ScotlandKailyardScottish LiteratureSunset SongJames Leslie Mitchell
Book:Another Song at Sunset: Jean Baxter, Scots poet and friend of Lewis Grassic Gibbon
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“For Scotland is made out of cities and the country and the sea, which means It's so much more, as an imagined space, a geography of the mind, Than its centres of population. Demographics are never enough And the way in which this might best be imagined starts In the work of Hugh MacDiarmid. And the poets and artists Who followed from that. Not as disciples. As students. As witnesses As thinking men and women, who understand the depths, complexities Subtleties and strengths and the cosmic clock, All the resources there, and all the risks required. from 'Scotland's Voices”

ScotlandHugh Macdiarmid
Book:Landmarks: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland
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“By 1938, Scotland had for nearly 200 years lived within a classic peripheral identity assigned to it by the artists and ideologues of the great European core cultures through the mode of Romanticism and their control of the means of (ideological) production. However, the brute fact of subsequent uneven economic development compelled the Scots to bring into collision with that historically assigned identity a new-fashioned identity more appropriate to a dynamic modern nation. Great national moments of self-presentation, such as the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938, were the occasions when the ongoing dialectic of modern/urban against rural/ancient emerged in its most public and delirious form. Such occasions therefore hold a political lesson. The process of speaking with two voices - the fissures; the uncertainties; the grating shifts of gear from one discourse to another - assert once more, the fluid, unstable character of national identity. Such occasions proclaim that national identity is not a set of inborn, natural characteristic in a people, but the product of that people's history. With the realisation of instability comes the realisation of the possibility of change.”

ScotlandRomanticismNational Identity1938Uneven DevelopmentGlasgow Empire ExhibitionPeripherality
Book:Popular Culture and Social Relations
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“The outbreak of war and the hiatus in non-essential building that it necessitated meant that the Empire Exhibition came to be looked back upon as a period ensemble, rather than the springboard to a new Scotland that those who planned it had hoped for. The international political situation meant that the demolition of the tower was not unexpected, and the imminent war was causing more pressing worries. By the time thar economic and political will for radical updating returned in the 1950s, concepts of what was modern in architecture and planning had moved on. Nonetheless, several of those subsequently involved in Scotland's post-war development would have been visitors, retaining memories of spaciousness, cleanliness, coordination and colour.”

DevelopmentScotlandWorld War 21938Glasgow Empire Exhibition
Book:Art Deco Scotland: Design and Architecture in the Jazz Age
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“And what is it that you believe in, Tam?” said the Cutty Sark, smiling. “In life? In love? In happiness? You don’t even know what they really are, none of you do! You’ve been deceived, by the greatest trick of them all! Here you live, like fabricated ships in a bottle. You can see the elements around you, but you can’t feel them- can’t even touch them…” She put her hand on his cheek again, and this time he didn’t move it away. “There’s a king, and a law, and a church, and they tell you exactly who you are, what you want- what you can have, and what you can dream of! But they’re just part of the deception, can’t you see? They’re just an illusion, a child’s play-thing, ready to be washed away like sand-castles on the beach when the tide comes in. Man-made institutions can never hold out against the real world forever. Against our world. Love it, hate it, desire it, fear it- but you can’t escape it!”

ScotlandRobert BurnsBonnie Prince CharlieCutty Sark
Book:Tam: The Three Changelings
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“The land held in common was of vast extent. In truth, the arable, the cultivated land of Scotland, the land early appropriated, and held by charter, is a narrow strip of the riverbank, or beside the sea. The inland, the upland, the moor, the mountain, were really not occupied at all for agricultural purposes, or served only to keep the poor and their cattle from starving.”

ScotlandCommon LandMoorlandArable LandCultivated Land
Book:Lectures on Scotch Legal Antiquities
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“Callum pulled a sgian dubh from out of his stocking and slammed it into the door-frame, where it lodged deep into the wood. “They call it the black knife,” he said. “But it is true steel. That’ll keep the witches frae’ your door at least, Mistress Nansie! Dia leat!” Nansie squeezed his hand. “Dia leat! God with you too, my son!” Callum crossed himself, touched the blade of the sgian dubh for luck and then padded softly down the stairs after the others. “Tapadh leat mo mhàthair!” he called back quietly. “But somethin’ tells me there’s no God where we’re headed…” He stepped out onto the moor, and plunged on into the darkness, until it swallowed him too.”

ScotlandGaelicHighlands RomanceRobert Burns
Author:Guy Winter
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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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“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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“The Maggie [Alexander Mackendrick, 1954] represents Scotland at its most self-lacerative. Precisely at the moment, the early fifties, when the massive penetration of American capital into Scotland was gathering pace, The Maggie actually sets the two halves of the contradiction - american entrepreneur and Scottish workers in opposition to each other, but with almost wilful perversity the film has the Scots win hands down. In true Kailyard style, what is not achievable at the level of political struggle is attainable in the Scottish imagination.”

ScotlandKailyard1954American CapitalistsAlexander Mackendrick
Book:Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television
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“The lorries thunder through mile upon mile of farmland, indeed, but... it is obviously related to an urban economy... Dereliction is the word... The stigmata of neglect litter the highway {A80] almost all the way from Glasgow to Stirling... let the intelligent traveller consider as he passes through them the nature and provenance of Millerston, Mollinsburn, Cumbernauld and Dennyloanhead. It is impossible to traverse such communities without seeing that something rather horrible once happened to Scotland, something from which it has never recovered.”

ScotlandIndustrialisation1934Central BeltCumbernauldDennyloanheadDerelictionMillerstonMollinsburn
Book:The Heart of Scotland
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“Why this weak indulgent puppet of France and the Roman Catholic Church should have become such a romantic figure in Scottish myth is inexplicable. (So peculiar was this last Jacobite rebellion that some historical pespective is necessary: it took place while Benjamin Franklin was corresponding with his English associates on electricity, the brothers Adam were still at the University of Edinburgh, and the idea of building a new town was forming in the imagination of Provost [George] Drummond.)”

ElectricityScotlandBenjamin FranklinCharles Edward StuartJacobitismProvost John Drummond
Book:Creating a Scottish Parliament
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“Just between Melrose and Bemersyde is a lovely panorama, taking in an oxbow of the Tweed and a fine aspect of the Eildon Hills, which has become known as 'Scott's View', supposedly because the horses stopped there during the funeral cortege. As we have seen, after his death, Scott is over-written onto the places he described. Scott-land is a palimpsest of Scotland and Scott's works.”

ScotlandPanoramaWalter ScottScottish BordersEildonRiver Tweed
Book:Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation
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