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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"Burke said there were three Estates in Parliament but in the reporters' gallery yonder there sat a fourth Estate more important than them all."
"All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred."
"The only society I like is rough and tough, and the tougher the better. There's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people."
"A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope."
"I thought you were supposed to be flying this thing, not pleasuring it."
"Today is not yesterday how can our works and thoughts if they are always to be the fittest continue always the same? Change indeed is painful yet ever needful."
"The principle that certain sins should not receive the Church's testimony of forgiveness was probably no novelty at all, but had been applied in various churches; perhaps, however, with no strict consistency."
"A writer is like a stick of rock - the words go right through."
"The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough."
"God does not exist to answer our prayers but by our prayers we come to discern the mind of God."
"This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it."
"Lately Mirabelle had reflected wistfully if people even noticed her " a smartly dressed woman who came and went along the Promenade, always alone."
"It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five."
"If God sees that my spiritual life will be furthered by giving the things for which I ask then He will give them but that is not the end of prayer. The end of prayer is that I come to know God Himself."
"Let each become all that he was created capable of being."
"The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then."
"If in preaching the gospel you substitute your knowledge of the way of salvation for confidence in the power of the gospel, you hinder people from getting to reality."
"Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer."
"You must suffer me to go my own dark way."
"When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory."
"The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction."
"You couldn't predict what was going to happen for one simple reason: people."
"There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune."
"Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly."
"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."
"Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
"The good thing about the aristocracy " German or English " was that they were easily traced, Mirabelle thought."
"A devil - "A power that lives against its life"."
"Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid."
"The more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much."
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