Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 2

Words were stories in themselves.
Ali Smith
...never act on the impulse of that feeling. If you do, you will cause difficult situations to arise which will take years to untangle. Wait for God's timing and He will do it without any heartache or disappointment.
Oswald Chambers
...To trust in the strength of God in our weakness; to say, ‘I am weak: so let me be: God is strong;’ to seek from him who is our life, as the natural, simple cure of all that is amiss with us, power to do, and be, and live, even when we are weary,—this is the victory that overcometh the world.To believe in God our strength in the face of all seeming denial, to believe in him out of the heart of weakness and unbelief, in spite of numbness and weariness and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream;to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for a godless repose;—these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love.‘I am weak,’ says the true soul, ‘but not so weak that I would not be strong; not so sleepy that I would not see the sun rise; not so lame but that I would walk! Thanks be to him who perfects strength in weakness, and gives to his beloved while they sleep!
George MacDonald
Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!
Sara Sheridan
I`ve got a black woolen hat and it`s got Pervert written across the front of it. It`s the name of the clothing label. And I was with my wife and my baby at the supermarket and I didn`t think. I just put my hat on Clara`s head, because it was cold. And the looks. I couldn`t figure out why I was getting death looks. And then I realized my 10-month old baby`s wearing a hat with the word Pervert written on it and these people were like, `There`s Satan! There`s Satan out with his kid!` And then I made a point of her wearing it every time we went there.
Ewan McGregor
It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes.
Sara Sheridan
There is no condition of life in which we cannot abide in Jesus. We have to learn to abide in Him wherever we are placed. Our Brilliant Heritage, 946 R
Oswald Chambers
How could I known then that failure then that failure of ambition is like a long lingering death and that disappoint with your life never goes away? It only grows stronger with the passage of time as the clock ticks off the remaining days of your life, and any residual, hope slips like sand through arthritic fingers.
Peter May
The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.
Sara Sheridan
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
Alexander Graham Bell
Parts of my 20s and 30s have gone by in a flash but my childhood is with me all the time.
Sara Sheridan
I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.
Sara Sheridan
If peace came it would have to do so when there had been time to allow the hatred to grow out of people’s thinking.
Sara Sheridan
It was getting dark by the time I went out, and nobody who knows the country will need to be told how black is the darkness of a November night under high laurel bushes and yew-trees. I walked into the heart of the shrubberies two or three times, not seeing a step before me, till I came out upon the broader carriage-road, where the trees opened a little, and there was a faint grey glimmer of sky visible, under which the great limes and elms stood darkling like ghosts; but it grew black again as I approached the corner where the ruins lay. ("The Open Door")
Mrs. Oliphant
Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-free sterile zone. There are monasteries and nunneries, and people become recluses, but even that's just an elegant way of giving up. Washing one's hand didn't work two thousand years ago, and it doesn't work today. Involvement, Cameron, connection.
Iain Banks
May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO's stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one another with nukes. "Dead From the Waist Down" on MTV. The humidity's making me horny and mad. I miss Robin. In his new book, Ken Wilbur calls it "skin hunger". I feel like I'm building up a charge. Monsoon's on its way.
Grant Morrison
It’s Christmas, and no matter what historical usage you choose to assign to “mass” be it mission or Lord’s Supper, Christ’s Mass refers to WHY he came, not THAT he came. Christ’s mission was to be a sacrifice.
William Branks
How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.
David Hume
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
We act like pagans in a crisis--only one out of an entire crowd is daring enough to invest his faith in the character of God.
Oswald Chambers
The Bible attitude is not that God sends sickness or that sickness is of the devil, but that sickness is a fact usable by both God and the devil.
Oswald Chambers
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 didn't expect to love being online as much as I do. I've met some wonderful people and discovered that however arcane some of my interests that there are people out there who are interested too.
Sara Sheridan
I was with a friend of mine recently who was dying and while he was lying there with his family around his bed, I just knew that was it, that was the best you can hope for in life - to have your family and the people who love you around you at the end.
Ewan McGregor
Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is one with aspiration, and will do more to elevate above what is low and vile than all possible inculcations of morality.
George MacDonald
When suicide is out of fashion we conclude that none but madmen destroy themselves; and all the efforts of courage appear chimerical to dastardly minds ... Nevertheless, how many instances are there, well attested, of men, in every other respect perfectly discreet, who, without remorse, rage, or despair, have quitted life for no other reason than because it was a burden to them, and have died with more composure than they lived?
David Hume
Don't you know Poole, you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?
Robert Louis Stevenson
And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Time is the empty space that allows knowledge—let alone wisdom—to grow.
John Hunter
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
For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.
Sara Sheridan
A good gulp of hot whisky at bedtime - it's not very scientific but it helps.
Alexander D. Fleming
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
...there are no new themes for a writer, only new ways of setting down old themes, new eyes to wander among old rocks.
Jim Crumley
Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
It was supposed to be us against the world, Tyler and me versus everyone else. Now it's just me.
Estelle Maskame
When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted friendship - when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He begins to teach us.
Oswald Chambers
It must be understood that in some cases the process by which a god or goddess degenerates into a fairy may occupy centuries, and that in the passage of generations such an alteration may be brought about in appearance and traits as to make it seem impossible that any relationship actually exists between the old form and the new. This may be accounted for by the circumstance that in gradually assuming the traits of fairyhood the god or goddess may also have taken on the characteristics of fairies which Already existed in the minds of the folk, the elves of a past age, who were already elves at a period when he or she still flourished in the full vigour of godhead. For in one sense Faerie represents a species of limbo, a great abyss of traditional material, into which every kind of ancient belief came to be cast as the acceptance of one new faith after another dictated the abandonment of forms and ideas unacceptable to its doctrines. The difference between god and fairy is indeed the difference between religion and folk-lore.
Lewis Spence
Walking through a deserted city in the hours before dawn is sobering way beyond the undoing of the effects of alcohol. Every thing is familiar, and everything is strange. It's as if you are the only survivor of some mysterious calamity which has emptied the place of its population, and yet you know that behind the shuttered and curtained windows people lie sleeping in their tens of thousands, and all their joys and disasters lie sleeping too. It makes you think of your own life, usually suspended at that hour, and how you are passing through it as if in a dream. Reality seems very unreal.
James Robertson
True faith takes its character and quality from its object. Its strength therefore depends on the character of Christ. Even those of us who have weak faith have the same strong Christ as others!
Sinclair B. Ferguson
He finds himself bored by the shenanigans of highly spirited young men. Their concerns reside somewhere between balder and dash.
Sara Sheridan
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
Everyone was important during the war. Everyone. We worked together and we won.
Sara Sheridan
You cannot have a moral holiday and remain moral, nor can you have a spiritual holiday and remain spiritual. God wants you to be entirely his, and this means that you have to watch to keep yourself fit. It takes a tremendous amount of time. Some of us expect to “clear the numberless ascensions”* in about two minutes.
Oswald Chambers
People see what they expect to see.
Sara Sheridan
Ferbin’s father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution.
Iain M. Banks
There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.
James Robertson
No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.
Adam Smith
Commerce and manufactures can seldom flourish long in any state which does not enjoy a regular administration of justice, in which the people do not feel themselves secure in the possession of their property, in which the faith of contracts is not supported by law, and in which the authority of the state is not supposed to be regularly employed in enforcing the payment of debts from all those who are able to pay. Commerce and manufactures, inshort, can seldom flourish in any state in which there is not a certain degree of confidence in the justice of government.
Adam Smith
When a man is at his wits' end it is not a cowardly thing to pray it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.
Oswald Chambers
God will not judge by man’s standard of what is right, but by His own, and they are vastly different!
William Branks
So you wish me to forget that you are a sheikh and a prince and a crown prince and soon to be King? That is a lot to forget.
Marguerite Kaye
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Never ask another person's advice about anything God makes you decide before Him.
Oswald Chambers
That’s what we’ve lost, you know. What you’ve lost; all of you. A sense of wonder and awe and . . . sin. These people know there are still things they don’t know, things that can still go wrong, things they can still do wrong.
Iain M. Banks
Most powerful of all powers in its holy insinuation is _being_. _To be_ is more powerful than even _to do_. Action _may_ be hypocrisy, but being is the thing itself, and is the parent of action.
George MacDonald
Hasn’t everyone taken a nervous breakdown at some point? Maybe I suffered a nervous breakthrough. I don’t know what tothink. It echoes inside your skull.
Kirkland Ciccone
Kindness was too painful. It had been a long time since he had had to endure it.
Sara Sheridan
A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined.
David Hume
She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.
Ali Smith