Best 284 quotes in «scotland quotes» category

I gave in to the weight around me. I’d become the Lady of the Lake without Excalibur, the damsel in distress without the prince to save her, Dorothy without her slippers or Alice without her “drink me” potion. Fantastic dreams weaved into amazing tales of triumph over obstacles. I was not triumphant over anything. I was a coward.

I had turned to leave and he had called after me. “Miss Maria, I kin no other woman who could be wearing men’s trousers and be dripping such as ye are and look quite so lovely. It’s a right shame your mother is marrying you off to that great sot!” I had turned to call back to him, “I doubt very much we will have to worry about that after today!

I have embraced Robert Burns and his beloved Scotland. I have heard the music of the authentic mother tongue. I have walked where he walked, lived where he lived, if only for a brief time, and seen where he died and where he was finally laid to rest. The ghost of Rabbie Burns will continue to walk beside me. And when I am gone, I will walk beside others who fight for the cause of truth.

I haven’t even been here an hour and already, Edinburgh is the city of my dreams.

I’m a weaver. I’m what is connecting this world to the world you come from. My purpose is to show you your choices.

I’m not broken. Not really,” I sighed. “My name is Novaleigh. Novaleigh Darrow.

I'm bad at this," she said with a laugh as she glanced up at him. "But I do know that people normally like to talk about themselves." Laith was enamored. Totally, completely. Utterly. "What do you want to know?" "Everything." Her gaze slowly lifted to meet his once again.

I'm not one to let such a striking man pass without looking my fill.

In my stories, I wrote Malcolm as fire and gold and power, but here in my arms, Colin is cedar, silver, and summer air.

I'm proud of the culture I come from - we're a small country and a close-knit community.

In an instant, five harlequin-like clowns emerged and began to perform all kinds of acrobatic tricks, encircling us––correction...corralling us. They were graceful but a little creepy too. They were wearing black and white costumes that were form fitting and appeared to move like some psychedelic drug trip when they flipped around. That of course was odd, but not nearly as odd as the chant they were singing as they continued to perform their tricks. See us dance. Watch us flip. Care to take a chance? We’ll only need a sip. Come to see our mistress? Or come to see our master? She can be quite viscous. But he is a disaster. We love them both, and we’ll let you choose. Either way, we wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.

I noticed that as I drove through the defaced and suffering patches of country which still persist between Glasgow and Hamilton and Airdrie and Motherwell, no scents from hedges and fields streamed into the open car. ...it was as if in this region nature no longer breathed, or gave out at most the chill dank mineral breath of coal and iron. The air itself had a synthetic taste, the taste of a food substitute, and seemed to be merely an up-to-date by-product of local industry. The forlorn villages looked like dismembered bits of towns brutally hacked off, and with the raw edges left nakedly exposed. The towns themselves, on the other hand, were like villages on a nightmare scale, which after endless building had never managed to produce what looked like a street, and had no centre of any kind. One could not say that these places were flying asunder, for there was no sign of anything holding them together. They were merely a great number of houses jumbled together in a wilderness of grime, coal-dust and brick, under a blackish-grey synthetic sky.

In prehistoric times, early man was bowled over by natural events: rain, thunder, lightning, the violent shaking and moving of the ground, mountains spewing deathly hot lava, the glow of the moon, the burning heat of the sun, the twinkling of the stars. Our human brain searched for an answer, and the conclusion was that it all must be caused by something greater than ourselves - this, of course, sprouted the earliest seeds of religion. This theory is certainly reflected in faery lore. In the beautiful sloping hills of Connemara in Ireland, for example, faeries were believed to have been just as beautiful, peaceful, and pleasant as the world around them. But in the Scottish Highlands, with their dark, brooding mountains and eerie highland lakes, villagers warned of deadly water-kelpies and spirit characters that packed a bit more punch.

In the letters section, a Scot reminds his readers of the ‘Glorious Alliance’ between France and Mary Queen of Scots, which explains why Scotland should not share the rabid Europhobia of Englishmen.

Ishbel read maps like storybooks. She was getting off the island, and no one was going to stop her. That was all just romance, just fairytales, because anyone can leave the island. Since they built the bridge, leaving should be as easy as sticking your keys in the car ignition. But leaving is never easy.

In the Scotland of the early seventeenth century, an old woman living alone in Kirkcudbrightshire was accused of witchcraft and on conviction was rolled downhill in a blazing tar barrel. One of the charges against her was that she walked withershins round a well near her cottage which was used by other people. The well was afterwards known as the Witch's Well. These episodes must surely serve as cautionary tales to anyone tempted to transgress the usual custom of walking deasil round a holy well.

I suppose there are some advantages to this place,' he admitted. 'I bet it's fucking raining in Stirling.

It feels like Scotland." "Have you ever been?" "Mmmm. Twice. Have you?" "No." "You should. It's your roots. You'll be surprised how much they tug at you when you breathe the air in the Highlands or look out at a lowland loch.

It’s been a while since I’ve wanted to smile.” “So all you needed was sex?” he teased.

It occurred to Gavin that the first thought a groom had upon spying his bride shouldn’t be to wonder whether or not she wore knickers.

It washed all over me and through me, into the floor and then it was gone. I never cried for my Da again after that, and God's presence has been with me ever since.” - Adien MacRae, BETWEEN

It’s raining,” she said with a glower out the window. He rose and walked around the island to stand next to her. “Shall we spend the day before a roaring fire making love?

It was early evening twilight when we came around a corner… and there in the road was a red deer stag. He leapt up the bank beside the road and then paused, looking back over his shoulder as we passed. Like a scene in a dream I watched him as he watched me. He was so close… so still and so beautiful. There was an instant of knowing that my heart was as trapped in this beautiful wildness as my eyes were caught in his calm curious gaze. It was a slowly growing realisation that I had fallen in love a third time… with this lovely, cold strange world of water and stone, sharp light and deep shadows. And I would never be the same again.

It was written in those stars that we meet.” His voice gathered a tender fervency that unstitched something from inside Mena’s soul. “We are bound in some inescapable way, thee and me. I’ve known it since I first laid eyes on ye in that dress.

I went to this beautiful place where the ground moved underneath me and the air was a part of me, and where time stopped. It was amazing and wonderful. But God sent me back, back to my body, back to you. - Lindsey Water

Listen to the earth, Feel the fire. Allow the power to flow through ye.

Logan lowers his head close to mine. 'Just know this, Ivy Calhhoun,' he begins. 'If I werena a ghost I would open all door for you, properly.

Long ago, when faeries and men still wandered the earth as brothers, the MacLeod chief fell in love with a beautiful faery woman. They had no sooner married and borne a child when she was summoned to return to her people. Husband and wife said a tearful goodbye and parted ways at Fairy Bridge, which you can still visit today. Despite the grieving chief, a celebration was held to honor the birth of the newborn boy, the next great chief of the MacLeods. In all the excitement of the celebration, the baby boy was left in his cradle and the blanket slipped off. In the cold Highland night he began to cry. The baby’s cry tore at his mother, even in another dimension, and so she went to him, wrapping him in her shawl. When the nursemaid arrived, she found the young chief in the arms of his mother, and the faery woman gave her a song she insisted must be sung to the little boy each night. The song became known as “The Dunvegan Cradle Song,” and it has been sung to little chieflings ever since. The shawl, too, she left as a gift: if the clan were ever in dire need, all they would have to do was wave the flag she’d wrapped around her son, and the faery people would come to their aid. Use the gift wisely, she instructed. The magic of the flag will work three times and no more. As I stood there in Dunvegan Castle, gazing at the Fairy Flag beneath its layers of protective glass, it was hard to imagine the history behind it. The fabric was dated somewhere between the fourth and seventh centuries. The fibers had been analyzed and were believed to be from Syria or Rhodes. Some thought it was part of the robe of an early Christian saint. Others thought it was a part of the war banner for Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, who gave it to the clan as a gift. But there were still others who believed it had come from the shoulders of a beautiful faery maiden. And that faery blood had flowed through the MacLeod family veins ever since. Those people were the MacLeods themselves.

London may have more money and Vienna more culture; Rome may have more history and Paris more style. But Glasgow has the biggest heart.

Lord, did he have the best smile. It was in turns sweet, seductive, and downright sexy. How could a man look so good without even seeming to try? Laith was charming, enticing, handsome, and fascinating. If she had to classify him, it would be sex-on-a-stick.

Lowlanders who left Scotland for Ireland between 1610 and 1690 were biologically compounded of many ancestral strains. While the Gaelic Highlanders of that time were (as they are probably still) overwhelmingly Celtic in ancestry, this was not true of the Lowlanders. Even if the theory of 'racial' inheritance of character were sound, the Lowlander had long since become a biological mixture, in which at least nine strains had met and mingled in different proportions. Three of the nine had been present in the Scotland of dim antiquity, before the Roman conquest: the aborigines of the Stone Ages, whoever they may have been; the Gaels, a Celtic people who overran the whole island of Britain from the continent around 500 B.C.; and the Britons, another Celtic folk of the same period, whose arrival pushed the Gaels northward into Scotland and westward into Wales. During the thousand years following the Roman occupation, four more elements were added to the Scottish mixture: the Roman itself—for, although Romans did not colonize the island, their soldiers can hardly have been celibate; the Teutonic Angles and Saxons, especially the former, who dominated the eastern Lowlands of Scotland for centuries; the Scots, a Celtic tribe which, by one of the ironies of history, invaded from Ireland the country that was eventually to bear their name (so that the Scotch-Irish were, in effect, returning to the home of some of their ancestors); and Norse adventurers and pirates, who raided and harassed the countryside and sometimes remained to settle. The two final and much smaller components of the mixture were Normans, who pushed north after they had dealt with England (many of them were actually invited by King David of Scotland to settle in his country), and Flemish traders, a small contingent who mostly remained in the towns of the eastern Lowlands. In addition to these, a tenth element, Englishmen—themselves quite as diverse in ancestry as the Scots, though with more of the Teutonic than the Celtic strains—constantly came across the Border to add to the mixture.

Maggie, tou made it possible -but not probably for me to be the man I am now.

Make no mistake; I know all I need to know about you, Lord Thorne.” “Do ye?” he challenged. “Sure do. You’re a famously unscrupulous man. A notorious womanizer. A rake who thinks nothing of seducing other men’s wives.” “Well, someone has to, do they not? I doona know many men who seduce their own wives.

Mary the Canary lives in a cloud of perfume and colours. She's an auxiliary nurse by day and a country and western singer by night: bed pans and power ballass. She's so glamorous she makes Mrs Hart look plain. She is the other woman and I'm bring trained to hate her even though I've never met her.

More bloodshed followed, as brother fought brother and religion battled religion in the age-old nonsense of settling whose method of worship was the holiest to our Creator, who, for all our murderous efforts, most likely despises the lot of us.

My angel of mercy.” The gut-wrenching words stabbed Masie in the chest. It wasn’t the first time she’d been called that. She looked down, horrified by what she saw. He was lying in a pool of blood, his hand out-stretched. “My angel,” he wheezed as he struggled to breathe. He was a warrior, strong and fearless. She bent down and whispered softly in his ear, “Close yer eyes and I’ll end yer pain.” She paused just before her teeth sank into his flesh. Something within his essence held her back. He had to live.

My heart has found a new place to call home. Wherever you are.

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here; My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer; A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe, My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

News of the death of James V on 14 December gave even further cause for rejoicing, because his heir was a week-old girl, the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. Scotland would be subject to yet another weakening regency—it had endured six during the past 150 years—and should give no further trouble.

No lack of time, strength or money shall prevent me from doing anything that I want to do,” was Sarah Macnaughtan’s lifelong motto, first uttered in her younger years. A compassionate and daring woman ahead of her time who stood barely over 5 feet tall, Sarah let no obstacles become roadblocks in her life.

Note savages, eh? They live in mountain caves and dress like wild men. They walk about in woolen petticoats, which they are not in the least modest about casting aside when they need their sword arms free. Dash me, can you even begin to imagine the sight of a horde of naked, hairy-legged creatures charging at you across a battlefield like bloody fiends out of hell—screaming and flailing those great bloody swords and axes of theirs like scythes? Not savages?

Och, lass. Yer going to have to not do that.” Faolán exhaled. “Creeping up on a man is a dangerous thing, and I confess I’m jumpier than most. Yer feet are soft as a cat’s.” “I wasn’t creeping anywhere, I was going to make coffee and this is my house, I’ll creep anywhere I like,” Colleen muttered with a petulant scowl. “But I wasn’t creeping.

One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.

Refusing to lean back against him, Colleen sat ramrod straight until they reached the road. “I guess I should say thank you for saving my life,” she muttered then turned and slapped Faolán hard across the face. “And that’s for you having to save it in the first place. And I’m not your woman, you big, arrogant, lying, betraying…faery loving…” She searched for the perfect insult and couldn’t find one, “…Scot.” She gave a very unladylike snort. “Happy now? That fiery enough for you?

Regretfully, he remained an alluring mystery, with fascinating lines and details she could not help but seek to examine further and memorize.

Robert Louis Stevenson wa Uskochi aliponukuu nahau ya ‘kamera haiwezi kudanganya’ katika kitabu chake cha ‘South Seas’ mwaka 1896, miaka 57 baada ya sanaa ya upigaji wa picha kugunduliwa, hakumaanisha tuwe asili. Hakumaanisha tusizirekebishe picha zetu baada ya kuzipiga na kuzisafisha! Alimaanisha tuwe nadhifu tuonekanapo mbele za watu au mbele ya vyombo vya habari; ambapo picha itapigwa, itasafishwa, itachapishwa na itauzwa kama ilivyo bila kurekebishwa.

Samantha imagined that in another life, she and Alison could have, indeed, been friends. Had she not been about to rob the train.

Scotland had no need of a 'resistant nationalism' precisely because it was an imperial nation engaged in projecting its national culture to the world. The historical problem of Scotland's 'absent nationalism' in the nineteenth century is a non-problem because far from lacking a nationalism, Scottish nationalism was vigorously engaged on imposing itself wherever Scots had achieved a determining or a significant role within the territory of the British Empire. Scottish nationalism did not need to assert itself within the British state because the 'world was its field', and its aim was to make Scotland the spiritual core of the imperial project.

Scotland can exist fully if we dream hard enough, Julie. I just can’t relate to that Scottish deep-fried-chip-on-the-shoulder. Trainspotting was wrong: it feels fucking great being Scottish. We’re becoming something, Julie. I can feel it. We’re getting dressed up.

She drank in the sight of him, the power, the virility, the sheer sexiness. She knew just how well those lips of his kissed, how gentle and coaxing his hands could be, and how mouth-watering his body was.