Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 6

For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.
Sara Sheridan
Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us?
Irvine Welsh
The most perfect happiness, surely, must arise from the contemplation of the most perfect object.
David Hume
By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.
Iain Banks
Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings.
Alexander Smith
She was herself in their company but a very specific version of herself.
Sara Sheridan
Sometimes people think you’re smart if you question the status quo, if nothing else.
Craig Ferguson
This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called “Gurgeh.” The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game.
Iain M. Banks
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.She laughed. 'Really?'The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.
Iain M. Banks
She did not even trouble herself much to show Godfrey her gratitude. We may spoil gratitude as we offer it, by insisting on its recognition. To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing.
George MacDonald
Temptations come as a general rule when they are sought.
Margaret Oliphant
It seemed that I performed better sober than drunk. Who knew?
Craig Ferguson
Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.
Nan Shepherd
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
She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside – ports were places of freedom.
Sara Sheridan
It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless—he may be of worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value—a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag.
George MacDonald
A paucity of material can open up just as many possibilities.
Sara Sheridan
I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.
Craig Ferguson
...let the past sleep, but let it sleep in the sweet embrace of Christ, and let us go on into the invincible future with Him.
Oswald Chambers
Funny how nobody talks on the tubes, isn't it? I rarely catch the tube myself, or lifts. Confined spaces, everybody shuts down. Why is that? Perhaps we think everybody on the tube is a potential psychopath or a drunk,so we close down and pretend to read a book or something.
John Hannah
When Britain first at Heaven's command Arose from out the azure main This was the charter of the land And Guardian angels sung this strain "Rule Britannia! rule the waves Britons never will be slaves."
James Thomson
Human nature is seldom at a loss to find or create an excuse for pursuing the predominant bias of inclination.
Helen Craik
History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.
Sara Sheridan
It's gonna take me a lot longer than a year without you to get over you.
Estelle Maskame
The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.
Oswald Chambers
The life of faith is not a life of mounting up with wings, but a life of walking and not fainting.
Oswald Chambers
...a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you might imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it.
Iain M. Banks
All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Adam Smith
My mother was tickled and I think kind of proud when my father got hit on my an attractive middle-aged Asian lady who hadn't noticed he was with his family. He was certainly pleased about it.
Craig Ferguson
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
Thomas Carlyle
Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.
Hal Duncan
The smallest issues can become the most important things in life and reality slips away.
David Millar
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
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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
Love and marriage are of the Father's most powerful means for the making of his foolish little ones into sons and daughters. But so unlike in many cases are the immediate consequences to those desired and expected, that it is hard for not a few to believe that he is anywhere looking after their fate--caring about them at all. And the doubt would be a reasonable one, if the end of things was marriage. But the end is life--that we become the children of God; after which, all things can and will go their grand, natural course; the heart of the Father will be content for his children, and the hearts of the children will be content in their Father.
George MacDonald
There is no hope but in prayer.
Andrew Bonar
The smog curled between the streetlamps and the spokes of the wrought iron framework. It seemed through your body and into your bones.
Sara Sheridan
Where'd the days go, when all we did was play? And the stress that we were under wasn't stress at all just a run and a jump into a harmless fall
Paolo Nutini
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
Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
Oh Satan you're a wily one.
Craig Ferguson
Do you really suppose God cares whether a man comes to good or ill?""If He did not, He could not be good himself...""...Then He can't be so hard on us as the parsons say, even in the after-life?""He will give absolute justice, which is the only good thing. He will spare nothing to bring His children back to himself, their sole well-being, whether He achieve it here--or there.
George MacDonald
Prayer is the supreme activity of all that is noblest in our personality and the essential nature of prayer is faith.
Oswald Chambers
We might give her presents, tell some tales, but would she ever be able to really understand what the journey had been like for us?
Sara Sheridan
The sun shines not on us but in us.
John Muir
No one provokes me with impunity (nemo me impune lacessit)
Motto of Scotland
Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she’d construct a story from it worthy of a novel.
Sara Sheridan
Adversity is like the period of the rain ... cold comfortless unfriendly to man and to animal yet from that season have their birth the flower the fruit the date the rose and the pomegranate.
Sir Walter Scott
The point is: what happens in heaven?''Unknowable wonderfulness?' 'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.''If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don't have life after death; you just have death.
Iain M. Banks
We choose our favourite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of humour and disposition. Mirth or passion, sentiment or reflection; whichever of these most predominates in our temper, it gives us a peculiar sympathy with the writer who resembles us.
David Hume
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
Through silent alleys where dark shadows fleeted past them like forest beasts on the prowl; through bustling market-places where bloaters predominated, into crammed gin-palaces where the gas flashed over faces whereon was stamped the indelible impression of a protest against creation; brushing tatters which were in gruesome harmony with the haggard or bloated features.("The Phantom Model
Hume Nisbet
Critics! Appalled I ventured on the name.Those cutthroat bandits in the paths of fame.
Robert Burns
When one door closes another opens. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us.
Alexander Graham Bell
Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin.The only vengeance worth having on sinis to make the sinner himself its executioner.
George MacDonald
Nothing is interesting if you're not interested.
Helen Maclnness
Bright morning comes; the bloody-fingered dawn with zealous light sets seas of air ablaze and bends to earth another false beginning. My eyes open like cornflowers, stick, crusted with their own stale dew, then take that light.
Iain Banks