Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 29

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.
Sara Sheridan
When you least expect it, you run in to an old friend from school, or the neighbour’s cat, not Mary the Virgin Mother of God.
Margot McCuaig
I likes me some ‘Shit Blows Up’ fiction, don’t get me wrong.
Hal Duncan
Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.
Hal Duncan
Wine is bottled poetry
Robert Louis Stevenson
This isn’t fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.
Ali Smith
When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the kitchen and said, "Sixty hamburgers?
Sara Sheridan
I was twelve. You were girls, and therefore an entirely different species.
Elizabeth May
Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.
Alasdair Gray
History repeated itself. The 'don't do the things I did' mantra was tiresome pish. The best way to make sure your children don't grow up as cunts is not to be one yourself - or not to let them SEE you being one. This is easier as a sober artist in Santa Barbara than as an alcoholic jailbird in Leith.
Irvine Welsh
It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God's children starving while actually seated at the Father's table.
Oswald Chambers
The notion of children makes me ill. The thought of having one... when you see those guys in the supermarket, wheeling the trolley around while their brats whine and wheedle and some blundering sow questions every little thing they take off the shelves. I mean, just the fucking idea of it, the very word: family. Whenever I see it, on travel brochures, on house schedules... I feel sick.
John Niven
People are incredibly rude about it sometimes. Like, `What? You`re married?` Strange reaction to have. Proves what people`s ideas about marriage are. `We`re having a baby.` `What?` As if it`s the end of the world. Of course, it`s the start of a brilliant world.
Ewan McGregor
We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.
Grant Morrison
The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.
George MacDonald
Gin a body meet a bodyComing thro' the rye,Gin a body kiss a body— Need a body cry?
Robert Burns
When the sun riseth first, the beams over-gild the tops of green mountains that look toward the east, and the world cannot hinder the sun to rise: some are so near heaven, that the everlasting Sun hath begun to make an everlasting day of glory on them; the rays that come from his face that sits on the throne, so over-goldeth the soul, that there is no possibility of clouding peace, or of hindering daylight in the souls of such.
Samuel Rutherford
Men ask for a rainbow in the cloud; but I would ask more from Thee. I would be, in my cloud, myself a rainbow -- a minister to others' joy. My patience will be perfect when it can work in the vineyard
George Matheson
There is an unreasonable joy to be had from the observation of small birds going about their bright, oblivious business
Grant Hutchison
But Mary had not come into the world to be sad or to help another to be sad. Sorrowful we may often have to be, but to indulge in sorrow is either not to know or to deny God our Saviour. True, her heart ached for Letty; and the ache immediately laid itself as close to Letty's ache as it could lie; but that was only the advance-guard of her army of salvation, the light cavalry of sympathy: the next division was help; and behind that lay patience, and strength, and hope, and faith,and joy. This last, modern teachers, having failed to regard it as a virtue, may well decline to regard as a duty; but he is a poor Christian indeed in whom joy has not at least a growing share, and Mary was not a poor Christian--at least, for the time she had been learning, and as Christians go in the present aeon of their history.
George MacDonald
There is no joy in the soul that has forgotten what God prizes.
Oswald Chambers
She wishes her grandmother had not been so protective, and that she understood better what passes between a man and woman. As it is, she simply enjoys the feelings and wonders if they are what lightning is made of, for everything comes back to the weather. Tears like rain. Smiles like the sun. Hair as dry as sand and fear like the dark ocean.
Sara Sheridan
It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted.
Sara Sheridan
What was it that marked me as a woman and was I prepared to let it go?
Sara Sheridan
His heart is pounding and when he kisses her it is as if the whole of Riyadh disappears – the wide sky, the hard surface of the roof, the date palms and the water wells.
Sara Sheridan
We had laid down the law : no chocolate, no sex.
Sara Sheridan
Kissing her is like drinking salted water, he thinks. His thirst only increases.
Sara Sheridan
Such a night cannot be shaken from a woman’s memory. Such a night changes your life forever.
Sara Sheridan
All those kisses. There must have been a thousand. They engulfed me like some kind of all consuming dream where I became very alive and very relaxed at the same time.
Sara Sheridan
Okay baby, let's take this rocket to Uranus. This hoor is perfect, and she can act as well.
Irvine Welsh
Sometimes you don’t even have to have sex at all, and for that kind of sicko, you charge double.
Sara Sheridan
I stroke a finger over my own top button, undo it, then let my hand drop with an exaggerated sigh. "It's not quite the same," I declare, "ripping my own clothes off.
Kate Tough
He tasted of whisky and his skin was rough where he hadn’t shaved, but Mirabelle kissed him back.
Sara Sheridan
But a far more virulent strain survived. It's having sex with your thoughts. You'll give birth to increasingly more monstrous ideas.
Grant Morrison
We kissed for a bit and I stopped shaking. We played with each other for a long time, and after we had joined, my cock and her fanny became one thing, then it seemed to vanish as we took off on a big psychic trip together. It was our souls and our minds that were doing it all; our genitals, our bodies, they were just launch pads and were soon superfluous as we went around the universe together on our shared trip, moving in and out of each other’s heads and finding nothing in them but good things, nothing in them but love. The intensity increased until it became almost unbearable and we exploded together in an orgasmic crash-landing onto the shipwreck of a bed, from a long way out in some form of space. We held each other tightly, drenched in sweat and shaking with emotion
Irvine Welsh
It 's the time of year when Canadians mate.
Craig Ferguson
If a man doesn't know how to dance he doesn't know how to make love, there I said it!
Craig Ferguson
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
Writers of novels live in a strange world where what's made up is as important as what's real.
Sara Sheridan
I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.
Sara Sheridan
While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.
Sara Sheridan
I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.
Sara Sheridan
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
I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.
Sara Sheridan
It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one’s judgement.
Sara Sheridan
When you fake emotion for a living, when you make your money providing fantasies for other people, tuning into their worlds and indulging them, you don’t invite someone into your world very easily.
Sara Sheridan
The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.
Iain M. Banks
Reality—there’s nothing but horror in that.
A.L. Kennedy
Beside her I felt grey, like she had all the colours I'd ever need.
Daniela Sacerdoti
My head, something happened to its insides. It was as if a storm at sea happened, but only for a moment, and only on the inside of my head. My ribcage, something definitely happened there. It was as if it unknotted itself from itself, like the hull of a ship hitting rock, giving way, and the ship that I was opened up inside me and in came the ocean.He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.But he looked really like a girl.She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.
Ali Smith
Indulge your passion for science…but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.
David Hume
Violent passions are formed in solitude. In the busy world no object has time to make a deep impression.
Henry Home
Never allow anything to divert you from your insight into Jesus Christ. It is the true test of whether you are spiritual or not. To be unspiritual means that other things have a growing fascination for you. Since mine eyes have looked on Jesus, I’ve lost sight of all beside, So enchained my spirit’s vision, Gazing on the Crucified.
Oswald Chambers
She knew exactly how he was feeling, because experience had taught her that the kind of excitement she was feeling at that moment was never, ever one-sided. On the contrary, she knew that it was born of acute and mutual anticipation, and she knew, too, that it would not be denied.
Jack Whyte
Letty's first false step was here: she said to herself _I can not_, and did not. She lacked courage--a want in her case not much to be wondered at, but much to be deplored, for courage of the true sort is just as needful to the character of a woman as of a man.
George MacDonald
One day we will all stand alone and answer to God for the choices we have made in our lives. It will not be enough to say we did not get help because no one would come with us. Life is not easy, but we make it much more difficult when we refuse to be honest about what we feel. For the short term, not being honest may seem easier, but in the long haul, we pay a heavy price.
Sheila Walsh
Boys [should be] inured from childhood to trifling risks and slight dangers of every possible description, such as tumbling into ponds and off of trees, etc., in order to strengthen their nervous system... They ought to practice leaping off heights into deep water. They ought never to hesitate to cross a stream over a narrow unsafe plank for fear of a ducking. They ought never to decline to climb up a tree, to pull fruit merely because there is a possibility of their falling off and breaking their necks. I firmly believe that boys were intended to encounter all kinds of risks, in order to prepare them to meet and grapple with risks and dangers incident to man’s career with cool, cautious self-possession...
R.M. Ballantyne
A good conscience is eight parts of courage.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die—that takes courage enough in itself, and more than enough.We are all brave men and we are all afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he too is brave and afraid like the all rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer.
Alistair MacLean
All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they'd really lost. All across the country, people felt they'd really won. All across the country, people felt they'd done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland. All across the country, people looked up Google: Irish Passport Applications. All across the country, people called each other cunts. All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimised. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing. All across the country, people had pinned their hopes on it. All across the country, people waved flags in the rain. All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti. All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told people to leave. All across the country, the media was insane. All across the country, politicians lied. All across the country, politicians fell apart. All across the country, politicians vanished...
Ali Smith