Quotes by Scottish Authors

Reticence was clearly a national characteristic, even if the other person spoke French.

A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time

She picked up the stout and took a sip. It slid down her throat like silk.

We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities—the hallmarks of civilisation.

Kathleen Jamie

If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we’d have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they’re erratic. People do crazy things that don’t make sense.

Sara Sheridan

Everything is, the way it is, for a reason. Or it isn't. Or neither. Or both. It's so hard to tell. It's so hard to tell you're a mile away by the Luke in your eye.

Alistair McHarg

There’s nothing like a military man, even out of uniform.

Sara Sheridan

She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over open water.

Sara Sheridan

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

Robert Louis Stevenson

I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.

Craig Ferguson

Parisians were not easy to engage in conversation. Perhaps that was why the Resistance had been so successful.

Sara Sheridan

You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.

Sara Sheridan

He had the fault of thinking too well of himself--which who has not who thinks of himself at all, apart from his relation to the holy force of life, within yet beyond him? It was the almost unconscious, assuredly the undetected, self-approbation of the ordinarily righteous man, the defect of whose righteousness makes him regard himself as upright, but the virtue of whose uprightness will at length disclose to his astonished view how immeasurably short of rectitude he comes. At the age of thirty, Godfrey Wardour had not yet become so displeased with himself as to turn self-roused energy upon betterment; and until then all growth must be of doubtful result. … His friends notwithstanding gave him credit for great imperturbability; but in such willfully undemonstrative men the evil burrows the more insidiously that it is masked by a constrained exterior.

George MacDonald

To be unable to bear disapproval was an unworthy weakness. But in her case it came nowise of the pride which blame stirs to resentment, but altogether of the self-depreciation which disapproval rouses to yet greater dispiriting. Praise was to her a precious thing, in part because it made her feel as if she could go on; blame, a misery, in part because it made her feel as if all was of no use, she never could do anything right. She had not yet learned that the right is the right, come of praise or blame what may. The right will produce more right and be its own reward--in the end a reward altogether infinite, for God will meet it with what is deeper than all right, namely, perfect love.

George MacDonald

What used to be edgy (divorces) has become mainstream and what used to be mainstream (racism and sexism) has become shocking.

Sara Sheridan

I've always had a keen sense of history. My father was an antiques dealer and he used to bring home boxes full of treasures, and each item always had a tale attached.

Sara Sheridan

On Twitter, people who had read my book followed me and I could see what else they were reading, why they'd liked what I'd written and by the by, more about them than I'd ever elicit from two minutes in a tent at a book festival, stuck behind a signing desk.

Sara Sheridan

I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.

Sara Sheridan

I will place no value on anything I have or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom of Christ. If anything will advance the interests of that kingdom, it shall be given away or kept, only as by giving or keeping it I shall most promote the glory ofHim to whom I owe all my hopes in time and eternity.

Robert Moffat

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.

Thomas Carlyle

Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

Sara Sheridan

It's salt. Why don't you sprinkle some on me, honey? Aren't I just good enough to eat?

Grant Morrison

Lying eats into the soul. If it becomes a habit it frays the edge of your spirit. Truth telling, although sometimes harder to do, strengthens your heart. It serves a person ill not to tell the truth.

Theresa Breslin

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others

Iain Banks

On of the prerequisites for my mobile phone is that I have to be able to fling it at a wall if I lose my temper.

Sara Sheridan

Those who have not been stung will hardly fear a bee the same as those who have.

Sara Sheridan

The Maestro spoke again. "When we are not, at what point do we become?" I could not reply. For I had grasped no shape of his thoughts. I understood neither what he said nor his intent behind it.

Theresa Breslin

The instant is not in time -- time is in the instant.

John Barbour

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

Sara Sheridan

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.

Sara Sheridan

Again, if there are really no fairies, why do people believe in them, all over the world? The ancient Greeks believed, so did the old Egyptians, and the Hindoos, and the Red Indians, and is it likely, if there are no fairies, that so many different peoples would have seen and heard them?

Andrew Lang

...[T]wo of you can be no match for the three giants, I will find you, if I can, a third brother, who will take on himself the third share of the fight, and the preparation...I will show him to you in a glass, and, when he comes, you will know him at once. If he will share your endeavors, you must teach him all you know, and he will repay you well, in present song, and in future deeds.'She opened the door of a curious old cabinet that stood in the room. On the inside of this door was an oval convex mirror...we at length saw reflected the place where we stood, and the old dame seated in her chair...at the feet of the dame lay a young man...weeping.'Surely this youth will not serve our ends,' said I, 'for he weeps.'The old woman smiled. 'Past tears are present strength,'said she.

George MacDonald

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

Sara Sheridan

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

Sara Sheridan

Okay baby, let's take this rocket to Uranus. This hoor is perfect, and she can act as well.

Irvine Welsh

He tasted of whisky and his skin was rough where he hadn’t shaved, but Mirabelle kissed him back.

Sara Sheridan

Carlyle's genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Balliol, we believe that 'no English writer has done more to elevate and purify our ideas of life and to make us conscious that the things of the spirit are real, and that in the last resort there is no other reality.

Hector Carsewell Macpherson

As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too.

Sara Sheridan

Upon the whole, Chymistry is as yet but an opening science, closely connected with the useful and ornamental arts, and worthy the attention of the liberal mind. And it must always become more and more so: for though it is only of late, that it has been looked upon in that light, the great progress already made in Chymical knowledge, gives us a pleasant prospect of rich additions to it. The Science is now studied on solid and rational grounds. While our knowledge is imperfect, it is apt to run into error: but Experiment is the thread that will lead us out of the labyrinth.

Joseph Black

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style. We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words. We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure. From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised. We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

Robert Louis Stevenson

Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.

John Muir

There was something indomitable about Maria – like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.

Sara Sheridan

I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.

Sara Sheridan

On the conversion of the European tribes to Christianity the ancient pagan worship was by no means incontinently abandoned. So wholesale had been the conversion of many peoples, whose chiefs or rulers had accepted the new faith on their behalf in a summary manner, that it would be absurd to suppose that any, general acquiescence in the new gospel immediately took place. Indeed, the old beliefs lurked in many neighbourhoods, and even a renaissance of some of them occurred in more than one area. Little by little, however, the Church succeeded in rooting out the public worship of the old pagan deities, but it found it quite impossible to effect an entire reversion of pagan ways, and in the end compromised by exalting the ancient deities to the position of saints in its calendar, either officially, or by usage. In the popular mind, however, these remained as the fairies of woodland and stream, whose worship in a broken-down form still flourished at wayside wells and forest shrines. The Matres, or Mother gods, particularly those of Celtic France and Ireland, the former of which had come to be Romanized, became the bonnes dames of folklore, while the dusii and pilosi, or hairy house-sprites, were so commonly paid tribute that the Church introduced a special question concerning them into its catechism of persons suspected of pagan practice. Nevertheless, the Roman Church, at a somewhat later era, reversed its older and more catholic policy, and sternly set its face against the cultus of paganism in Europe, stigmatizing the several kinds of spirits and derelict gods who were the objects of its worship as demons and devils, whom mankind must eschew with the most pious care if it were to avoid damnation.

Lewis Spence

You’re young, and like anything new. It’s change you want. I’m middle-aged, and there’s nothing staler to me than change. Constant comfort and little luxuries as regular as the clock are fresher than change.

John Davidson

I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.

Grant Morrison

Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read.

Don Paterson

The History Of The Universe In Three WordsCHAPTER ONEBang!CHAPTER TWOsssssCHAPTER THREEcrunch.THE END

Iain M. Banks

Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!

Thomas Carlyle

(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.

Thomas Carlyle