Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 27

Like some of the rest of us, she never reflected how balefully her evil mood might operate; and that all things work for good in the end, will not cover those by whom come the offenses. Another night's rest, it is true, sent the evil mood to sleep again for a time, but did not exorcise it; for there are demons that go not out without prayer, and a bad temper is one of them--a demon as contemptible, mean-spirited, and unjust, as any in the peerage of hell--much petted, nevertheless, and excused, by us poor lunatics who are possessed by him.
George MacDonald
Prayer is not an exercise, it is the life of the saint. Beware of anything that stops the offering up of prayer.
Oswald Chambers
What a blessed habit I have found my prayer list, morning by morning, it takes me via the Throne of all Grace straight to the intimate personal heart of each one mentioned here, and I know that He Who is not prescribed by time and geography answers immediately.
Oswald Chambers
I want to tell you a growing conviction with me, and that is that as we obey the leadings of the Spirit of God, we enable God to answer the prayers of other people. I mean that our lives, my life, is the answer to someone’s prayer, prayed perhaps centuries ago.It is more and more impossible to me to have programmes and plans because God alone has the plan, and our plans are only apt to hinder Him, and make it necessary for Him to break them up. I have the unspeakable knowledge that my life is the answer to prayers, and that God is blessing me and making me a blessing entirely of His sovereign grace and nothing to do with my merits, saving as I am bold enough to trust His leading and not the dictates of my own wisdom and common sense.
Oswald Chambers
We tend to use prayer as a last resort, but God wants it to be our first line of defense. We pray when there's nothing else we can do, but God wants us to pray before we do anything at all.Most of us would prefer, however, to spend our time doing something that will get immediate results. We don't want to wait for God to resolve matters in His good time because His idea of 'good time' is seldom in sync with ours.
Oswald Chambers
When you're depressed you retreat and you go into a smaller world. This is why Brighton worked well for the story, because it's a smaller world than London.
Sara Sheridan
I never knew You lived so close to the floor,but every time I am bowed down,crushed by this weight of grief,I feel Your hand on my head,Your breath on my cheek,Your tears on my neck.You never tell me to pull myself together,to stem the flow of many years.You simply stay by my sidefor as long as it takes,so close to the floor.
Sheila Walsh
Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.
Thomas Carlyle
We have to take the first step as though there were no God. It is no use to wait for God to help us, He will not: but immediately we arise we find He is there.
Oswald Chambers
All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words.
George MacDonald
The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison.
Thomas Carlyle
A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character.
Sara Sheridan
I am completely unflustered by whichever medium people choose to read my words. I'm just delighted they're reading them at all!
Sara Sheridan
Edinburgh is alive with words.
Sara Sheridan
A writer is like a stick of rock - the words go right through.
Sara Sheridan
I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Words are themselves organisms, ...
Ali Smith
Words were stories in themselves.
Ali Smith
Words is but wind but dunts is the devil
Dorothy Dunnett
They were both young men under thirty. Art is not so precocious as literature, and does not send quite so many early potatoes into the market, so that the age of thirty is considered young enough for a painter to have learnt his business sufficiently to be marketable from the picture-dealing point of view. ("The Phantom Model")
Hume Nisbet
Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature.
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
I can't bear literary snobbery.
Sara Sheridan
Anything could happen in the company of a woman whose usual status is ‘apparition’.
Margot McCuaig
Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)
Gilbert Highet
So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets.
Hal Duncan
Books have that strange quality, that being of the frailest and tenderest matter, they outlast brass, iron and marble.
William Drummond
These (Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo) not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse.  Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable.  The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature.  The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs.  He follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
Robert Louis Stevenson
A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind’s eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.
Sara Sheridan
In literature, as in love, one can only speak for himself.
Andrew Lang
Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here…think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.
Alasdair Gray
If you want to know a country, read its writers.
Aminatta Forna
At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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
Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed," he said. "And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their exc
Iain M. Banks
I have lost confidence in myself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
...properly a theory about knowledge, not about religion. A theist and a Christian may be an agnostic; an atheist may not be an agnostic. An atheist may deny that there is God, and in this case his atheism is dogmatic and not agnostic. Or he may refuse to acknowledge that there is a God simply on the ground that he perceives no evidence for his existence and finds the arguments which have been advanced in proof of it invalid. In this case his atheism is critical, not agnostic. The atheist may be, and not infrequently is, an agnostic.
Robert Flint
I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Thomas Carlyle
In wartime people took action because of what they believed in. In peacetime people were driven by their private concerns.
Sara Sheridan
I think that everyone has something that they will kill for.
Sara Sheridan
If you place belief on a pedestal, it will become your prison.
Ken Dickson
That's all nonsense," said Curdie. "I don't know what you mean." "Then if you don't know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense?
George MacDonald
You must give him time,' said her grandmother;'and you must be content not to be believed for a while. It is very hard to bear; but I have had to bear it, and shall have to bear it yet. I will take care of what Curdie thinks of you in the end. You must let him go now.
George MacDonald
One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.
Iain M. Banks
Does a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.
David Hume
The past is as important as the future, but we only live in the here and now.
David Millar
Nature  …   has made it impossible for us to have any communication from this earth with the other great bodies of the universe, in our present state; and it is highly possible that he has likewise cut off all communication betwixt the other planets, and betwixt the different systems.… We observe, in all of them, enough to raise our curiosity, but not to satisfy it  …   It does not appear to be suitable to the wisdom that shines throughout all nature, to suppose that we should see so far, and have our curiosity so much raised  …   only to be disappointed at the end  …   This, therefore, naturally leads us to consider our present state as only the dawn or beginning of our existence, and as a state of preparation or probation for farther advancement.…
Colin Maclaurin
Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.
Iain M. Banks
If we don't value the people who inspire us (and money is one mark of that) then what kind of culture are we building?
Sara Sheridan
Our archives are treasure troves - a testament to many lives lived and the complexity of the way we move forward. They contain clues to the real concerns of day-to-day life that bring the past alive.
Sara Sheridan
They march into the future to the rhythm of the past.
Sara Sheridan
You have no future when the past rules you.
Sara Sheridan
You couldn’t predict what was going to happen for one simple reason: people.
Sara Sheridan
Dec. 31… “Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ. Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.
Oswald Chambers
I'm immortal. You consider the future because one day you'll die. I don't have that uncertainty." - Kiaran
Elizabeth May
Imagination paints a charming view of the future, conveniently adapted to the demands of our current emotion.
John Armstrong
The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.
George MacDonald
I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?
Robert Louis Stevenson
The smallest issues can become the most important things in life and reality slips away.
David Millar
Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.
Hal Duncan