Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 28

We cannot alter other people, or their lives, or their destinies, by offering them sweets to take away the bitter taste, any more than they can alter us.
Kenneth MacKenzie
Sow a thought, and you reap an act;Sow an act, and you reap a habit;Sow a habit, and you reap a character;Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
Samuel Smiles
When fate hands us a lemon, let's try to make lemonade.
Andrew Carnegie
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
Thomas Carlyle
If you persist over time, refusing to take offense, making your motive genuine, showing respect, and constantly searching for Mutual Purpose, then the other person will almost join you in a dialogue.
Ron McMillan
The wisest use of these skills is to develop habits, lives, and loves, not to use them just occasionally in single interactions.
Ron McMillan
And what cats have to tellon each return from hellis this: that dying is what the living do, that dying is what the loving do, and that dead dogs are those who do not knowthat dying is what, to live, each has to do.
Alastair Reid
I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.
Sara Sheridan
Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
William Wallace
Then I wondered why on earth would anyone ever stand in the world as if standing in the cornucopic middle of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but inside a tiny white-painted rectangle about the size of a single space in a car park, refusing to come out of it, and all around her or him the whole world, beautiful, various, waiting?
Ali Smith
Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it listed went out a sigh of thanksgiving. At last I was! I lived, and nothing could touch my life! My darling walked beside me, and we were on our way home to see the Father!
George MacDonald
Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Past tears are present strength.
George MacDonald
...[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
It is just the old way--that of obedience. If you have ever seen the Lord, if only from afar--if you have any vaguest suspicion that the Jew Jesus, who professed to have come from God, was a better man, a different man--one of your first duties must be to open your ears to His words and see whether they seem to you to be true. Then, if they do, to obey them with your whole strength and might. This is the way of life, which will lead a man out of its miseries into life indeed.
George MacDonald
The net has provided a level playing field for criticism and comment - anyone and everyone is entitled to their opinion - and that is one of its greatest strengths.
Sara Sheridan
Waiting with hope is very difficult, but true patience is expressed when we must even wait for hope. I will have reached the point of greatest strength once I have learned to wait for hope." George Matheson
George Matheson
We must go on, because we can't turn back.
Robert Louis Stevenson
the truth she gathered, enlarging her strength, enlarged likewise the composure that comes of strength.
George MacDonald
Never to whine; to accept what came; to wait for better; to take what you could; to let no one, not even yourself, know how near to giving in you were.
Robin Jenkins
One thing you'll learn when you're in the business of selling utter shite to the Great British Public is that there's really no bottom to where they'll go. Shit food, shit TV, shit bands, shit films, shit houses. There is absolutely no fucking bottom with this stuff. The shittier you can make it - a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy of what was a shit idea in the first place - the more they'll eat it up with a big fucking spoon, from dawn till dusk, from now until the end of time. It's too good.
John Niven
I don’t think they can deal with someone being complex and contradictory; it’s not acceptable, you have to be a cartoon, a stereotype.
Shirley Manson
An important part of deciding where we want to go, as a society and culture, is knowing where we have come from, and indeed, how far we have come.
Sara Sheridan
As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today.
Sara Sheridan
Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.
Sara Sheridan
Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us.
Sara Sheridan
See, you have the choice we didn’t. You wanna think about it though, you do, before you decide to throw your lot in with us. Cause it’s not just about living in society’s stitches, you know, the bits in between, the squats and secret places. It’s about being Fixed.
Hal Duncan
If there is any societyamong robbers and murderers, they must at least. . . .abstainfrom robbing and murdering one another. So beneficenceis less essential than justice is to the existence of society; alack of beneficence will make a society uncomfortable, butthe prevalence of injustice will utterly destroy it.
Adam Smith
A nation discovers its truest dignity when it cherishes the dignity of those from whom it has not heard for a very long time.
Sally Magnusson
Society is neither my master nor my servant, neither my father nor my sister; and so long as she does not bar my way to the kingdom of heaven, which is the only society worth getting into, I feel no right to complain of how she treats me. I have no claim on her; I do not acknowledge her laws--hardly her existence, and she has no authority over me. Why should she, how could she, constituted as she is, receive such as me? The moment she did so, she would cease to be what she is; and, if all be true that one hears of her, she does me a kindness in excluding me. What can it matter to me, Letty, whether they call me a lady or not, so long as Jesus says “Daughter” to me?
George MacDonald
[W]e might do better here to think of culture as fashion. And in fashion, of course, the key is not wearing a particular outfit but being able to wear it ... Clothing is a mere collection of garments; fashionability is a performative capacity, an ability to effect the right look through an effective combination of garments, social sense, and bodily performance.
James Ferguson
Dear Mrs Chiley," said Lucilla, "it doesn't matter in the least what you wear; there are only to be gentlemen, you, know, and one never dresses for gentlemen. (...) Their vanity is something dreadful-but it is one of my principles never to dress unless there are ladies.
Mrs. Oliphant
The nearer persons come to each other, the greater is the room and the more are the occasions for courtesy; but just in proportion to their approach the gentleness of most men diminishes.
George MacDonald
Who did the council fight?""It split in two and fought itself.""That's suicide!""No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.""I refuse to believe men kill each other just to make their enemies rich.""How can men recognize their real enemies when their family, schools and work teach them to struggle with each other and to believe law and decency come from the teachers?""My son won't be taught that," said Lanark firmly."You have a son?""Not yet.
Alasdair Gray
No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.
Adam Smith
Renton looks at her and sees her pain and anger. It cuts himup. It confuses him. Kelly has a great sense of humour. What's wrong with her? The knee–jerkthought: Wrong time of the' month is forming in his head when he looks about and picks up theintonations of the laughter around the bar. It's not funny laughter.This is lynch mob laughter.How was ah tae know, he thinks. How the fuck was ah tae know?
Irvine Welsh
I believe the era of the militant lady is back.
Sara Sheridan
Looking at my life through the lens of history has made me increasingly grateful to standout women who pushed those boundaries to make the changes from which I have benefited.
Sara Sheridan
I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us.
Sara Sheridan
In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we're supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parents, and still stay sane.
Sara Sheridan
I'm not sure how much easier it is for a mother to balance her life now - have we simply swapped one set of restrictions for another?
Sara Sheridan
While I'm frustrated at the amount I'm expected to take on in the present, the 1950s woman was frustrated by being excluded - not being allowed to take things on at all.
Sara Sheridan
Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted.
Sara Sheridan
The one on the left," Worthil said, "is a male, carrying the testes and penis. The middle one is equipped with a kind of reversible vagina, and ovaries. The vagina turns inside-out to implant the fertilised egg in the third sex, on the right, which has a womb. The one in the middle is the dominant sex."Gurgeh had to think about this. "The what?" he said.
Iain M. Banks
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constpatory too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.
Iain Banks
It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.
Alasdair MacIntyre
I decided to coin the term 'cosy crime noir' for Brighton Belle. That is 'cosy crime' for today's sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it.
Sara Sheridan
I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.
Sara Sheridan
You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!.
Sara Sheridan
Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.
Sara Sheridan
The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum.
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
...but the air's flat and stale and the people half-hearted. There's nothing to do there. You can make love without trouble or meaning, or get mildly drunk, or extract second-hand emotions from the cinema, or put your mind to sleep on a dance-floor, or play bridge, or throw yourself in front of a train on the Underground. There are forty ways of escaping from consciousness. But I want something more exciting than that.
Eric Linklater
Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.
Sara Sheridan
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
Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.
Sara Sheridan
Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.
Sara Sheridan
I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.
Sara Sheridan
I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.
Sara Sheridan