Scotland Quotes

“Willy's Definitive Dram Definition

Willy, one of the guys at the distillery, comes up with what Oliver and I agree is the best definition of what a 'dram' actually is: 'A measure of whisky that is pleasing to both guest and host.”
― Iain Banks, Raw Spirit

“There is no glory in ruin; it only matters because of what comes after.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Bravely

“Banksie, hi. What you up to?'
'Well, I'm going to be writing a book about whisky.'
'You're what?'
'I'm going to be writing a book about whisky. I've been, umm, you know, commissioned. To write a book about it. About whisky. Malt whisky, actually.'
'You're writing a book about whisky?'
'Yeah. It means I have to go all over Scotland, driving mostly, but taking other types of transport - ferries, planes, trains, that sort of thing - visiting distilleries and tasting malt whisky. With expenses, obviously.'
'You serious?'
'Course I'm serious!'
'Really?'
'Oh yeah.'
'... Do you need any help with this?”
― Iain Banks, Raw Spirit

“Large-scale reforestation of the Scottish hills and uplands through natural regeneration offers a tantalising prospect in terms of recovering our lost biodiversity, balancing our carbon budget and, I would argue, an opportunity to reinvigorate the economy of remoter rural areas. All that stands in the way are medieval laws designed centuries ago to prevent poaching and exclude people, and a forestry sector that follows, blindly, the corporate industrial forestry model.”
― Douglas Macmillan, Reforesting Scotland 66, Autumn/Winter 2022

“The ideal coorie scene should reflect a balance of the outside and in.
Bring to mind a day spent Munro-bagging or loch swimming, bookended by a bowl of something hot and nourishing as you dry off next to a heat source with a contended dog at your side.
Don't forget smell: faint lanolin clinging to woollen blankets, cinnamon dissolving into porridge cooking slowly on the hob, the frosty pinch of winter air when you step into a Trossachs morning.
If a King Creosote album is playing as you road trip across the humpbacked north-west Highlands then all the better.
The more homegrown ingredients are added to the mix, the coorier life will be.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“Coorie's newfound role has been helped along by the fact it is a beautiful word.
Derived from Old Scots, there is something soothing about the look, sound and shape of coorie: soft in the mouth and easy for both natives and non-natives to pronounce.
A kind of dove's trill for the human tongue.”
― Gabriella Bennett

“Robertson also believes coorie is especially relevant in the winter when it suggests shelter.
"When it's cold, wet and windy outside, and night has fallen, there's nothing better than to be cooried in by the fireside," he adds.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“It tipped "cosagach" , similar to coorie, as a trend.
The Gaelic word loosely translates to mean cosy; the tourist board encourages visitors staying in Highland log cabins to get comfy beside a roaring fire with a book, a hot toddy and good friends.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“...a lack of affordable housing in rural Scotland is perhaps the biggest issue threatening the viability of communities today. This situation is not new but since house prices really took off some 20 years ago, there is asense that the issue has now become existential. Lack of employment is often similarly highlighted as a major issue, but thanks to the social security system most people can manage, to some degree at least, a period of being unemployed or under employed. In contrast, without adequate and secure accommodation people very quickly have to leave their home communities in search of housing, more often than not in distant towns and cities - even if, as is often the dase, they have a job offer locally.”
― Jamie McIntyre, Reforesting Scotland 67, Spring/Summer 2023

“The term 'green lairds' is a loaded one, used to describe wealthy individuals and companies who buy large swathes of Scotland, in many cases to 'offset' their carbon emissions - much easier than actually reducing emissions at source.”
― Mandy Meikle, Reforesting Scotland 67, Spring/Summer 2023

“Otto: A bonny country, Scotland, if all I've heard is
correct, what with the banshees wailing and the four-
leaved shamrock.

Gilda: That's Ireland, dear.

Otto: Never mind. The same wistful dampness distinguishes them both.”
― Noël Coward, Design for Living

“For some, this idea was a shade too close to the lifestyles our Nordic cousins.
Hygge and lagom, the Danish and Swedish movements of living well.
But while these movements laid the groundwork for a similar trend to emerge in Scotland, coorie has some obvious differences.
Where hygge is concerned with the pursuit of happiness through candles, coffee and togetherness, coorie seeks to make the most of what comes from Scotland to feel satisfied.
Lagom is the art of balancing frugality and fairness to create a balanced existence. Coorie takes into account being kind to the earth and our wallets, but can also extend to premium experiences once in a while.
Crucially, neither of these Scandinavian lifestyle approaches took their starting point from what is dug out of the earth.
Coorie is more than simply being cosy.
Sure, it is linked, but more importantly it focuses on working out how to be in tune with our surroundings to evoke that feeling.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“Coorie also takes into account the unique trials of living in Scotland.
Instead of allowing the weather or the geography to shape our lives in negative ways, coorie harnesses these challenges.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“Glasgow can be uncommonly dreich, smirr blurring the architectural mishmash of the city's skyline.
The east coast plays host to some truly cruel gales, eroding the sharp edges off fishermen's cottages in Fife and Angus.
In the winter months it can feel like the country takes any opportunity to grind to a halt.
The faintest threat of snow causes chaos across road, rail and air.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“Perhaps we live in a wilder place than we give ourselves credit for.
Scots tend to be hardy perennials.
It's as if we've evolved to withstand the challenging nature of our own country.
And what's more, we've worked out how to shape it into a force for good.
Out of necessity our homes feature clever ways to keep the outside out and the inside warm.
Scotland's oldest towerhouses were built with slits for windows not just as a defensive measure, but to protect residents from the elements.
Out of problems came solutions, even beauty.
Our foreparents thought to install open fires to heat their homes then toiled to make them easy on the eye.
Intricately carved wooden fireplaces and elaborate hearths that referenced Scottish folklore followed.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“She didn't think that she was superior to her visitor because she could speak in two languages, though not so well in English as in Gaelic, whereas he knew only one. After all, rich people and rich people's servants didn't know Gaelic: that was the way it was.”
― Iain Crichton Smith

“The reign of Alexander III followed a long period which effected a transformation of law, government and society, forging a coherent medieval kingdom out of a patchwork of territorial lordships. As the kingdom gradually emerged, so did an idea of what it meant to be Scottish. The governmental structures which evolved and the national identity which they enabled were to be crucial to the survival of Scotland through the wars of the fourteenth century and have remained a vital element in the deep-seated affinities which have maintained a distinctive Scottish society until the present day. My concluding contention is therefore that Alexander III's reign marks a high-point in Scottish medieval kingship.”
― Norman H. Reid, Alexander III, 1249 - 1286: First Among Equals

“I said Burns was a great Scottish poet who loved before Scott, and Shakespeare and Dickens et cetera were all English, but he could not grasp the difference between Scotland and England.”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

“On the way back, Columba made a little detour. From a mound above the monastery he blessed it and all the people who would in the future come to the island [Iona] for his sake. Then he returned to his cell, not to rest but to go on with his daily stint of copying the scriptures. He was working on the thirty-fourth psalm. He wrote steadily for a while, but when he got to the verse that says, They that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing, he put down his pen. It seemed a perfect place to stop.
"I think I can write no more," he said.”
― Eileen Dunlop, Tales of st Columba

“This is where stiff whisky really does make all the difference. No matter how fucked up the world may get, a good dram will make it at least slightly more bearable.

And A-flippin-men to that.”
― Iain Banks, Raw Spirit

“If nations are founded not in unity but in exchange, both exchange within a national territory whose boundaries are largely arbitrary, and exchange with cultures that are other to them in time and space, then those bugbears of Scottish cultural history - Lowland Scotland's adoption of the iconography of a Highland Celtic identity and the country's increasing 'Anglicisation' - can be read not as the signs of failed nationhood but as evidence of a nation which has grasped that its real resources are generated by its capacity for cultural export, translation and assimilation.”
― Cairns Craig, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment

“Within the Atlantic archipelago, there is a persistent idea that Ireland, Scotland and Wales are qualitatively different from England, that they are inherently and permanently 'Celtic' in spite of modern realities, and that nations of the 'Celtic Fringe' (a term which places England at the centre and places the 'Celtic nations' at the periphery) share some vague spiritual or racial bond.”
― Richard Alan Barlow, Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms

“It was from my uncle I learned all that I know of the early history of Scotland—of Wallace and Bruce and Burns, of Blind Harry's history, of Scott, Ramsey, Tannahill, Hogg, and Fergusson. I can truly say in the words of Burns that there was then and there created in me a vein of Scottish prejudice (or patriotism) which will cease to exist only with life. Wallace, of course, was our hero. Everything heroic centered in him. Sad was the day when a wicked big boy at school told me that England was far larger than Scotland. I went to the uncle, who had the remedy.
"Not at all, Naig; if Scotland were rolled out flat as England, Scotland would be the larger, but would you have the Highlands rolled down?"
Oh, never! There was balm in Gilead for the wounded young patriot. Later the greater population of England was forced upon me, and again to the uncle I went.
"Yes, Naig, seven to one, but there were more than that odds against us at Bannockburn." And again there was joy in my heart—joy that there were more English men there since the glory was the greater.”
― Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

“...the idea that Smith can somehow be seen as representative of modern capitalism is a stretch. He was a man of his time, in the very particular society of oligarchic, 18th century Scotland. It was a world in which he thrived precisely by not fighting the status quo, but rather by making a proposal for harnessing greed, while keeping merchants in their social place and celebrating the ruling class of the time, and trying to envision a way in which it could play a part in a modernizing economy. In many ways, he got it right. While capitalism flourished in 18th century Scotland, the landed elite remained firmly in place and has managed to do so to this very day. In that aspect, Smith was quite visionary.”
― Jacob Soll, Adam Smith: The Kirkcaldy Papers

“Here is a situation: a country that is not fully a country, a nation that does not quite believe itself to be a nation, exists within, and as a small and distant part of, a greater state. The greater state was once a very great state, with its own empire. It is no longer great, but its leaders and many of its people like to believe it is. For the people of the less-than country, the not-quite nation, there are competing, conflicting loyalties. The are confused. For generations a kind of balance has been maintained. There has been give and take, and, yes, there have been arguments about how much give and how much take, but now something has changed. There is a sense of injustice, of neglect, of the real operation. Nobody is being shot, there are no political prisoners, there is very little censorship, but still that sense persists: this is wrong. It grows. It demands to be addressed. The situation needs to be fixed.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“It requires great love of it deeply to read
The configuration of a land,
Gradually grow conscious of fine shadings,
Of great meanings in slight symbols,
Hear at last the great voice that speaks softly,
See the swell and fall upon the flank
Of a statue carved out in a whole country’s marble,
Be like Spring, like a hand in a window
Moving New and Old things carefully to and fro,
Moving a fraction of flower here,
Placing an inch of air there,
And without breaking anything.
So I have gathered unto myself
All the loose ends of Scotland,
And by naming them and accepting them,
Loving them and identifying myself with them,
Attempt to express the whole.”
― Hugh MacDiarmid, The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Volume 1

“[Under] David I (1124-530, Scotland undoubtedly had a place in the comity of catholic realms. It restored a regular ecclesiastical organisation, received the new religious orders which revived the spiritual life of the Church, and accepted French secular culture, which, allowing for local variants, dominated the ruling classes west of the Elbe including much of Britain, where not only knighthood and chivalry, but also French language and Romance literature inspired, even pervaded, the culture of the ruling elite.”
― A.A.M. Duncan, Why Scottish History Matters

“The Church and learning had formed the main channels through which Scotland's links with Europe - in both directions - had run. In 1560 or 1638 as much as in 1450, students went abroad to pursue a second degree: in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, their most usual destinations were the universities of Louvain and Cologne; Paris was the favourite resort of promising Scots scholars for the two generations either side of the Reformation of 1560; by the 1580s the Calvinist University of Heidelberg and the Huguenot academies had taken over from Beza's Geneva; and by 1625 Leiden in the Netherlands had become a Mecca for the two rising professions, the ministry and the law.”
― Michael Lynch, Why Scottish History Matters

“It's just like in the Book of Life, on the Last Day. My father taught me that the devil is kept at bay by the man who puts the flow of his life upon the holy book. That is the covenant, pure and simple, between God and man, sealed in blood. God’s blood. Our blood. That is everything, in the end.”
― Avellina Balestri, All Ye That Pass By: Book 1: Gone for a Soldier

“The new political integration might well have doomed Scotland to the status of an English economic satellite: a supplier of foods, raw materials and cheap labour for the more sophisticated southern economy but with little possibility of achieving manufacturing growth and diversification in her own right...Union could well have been the political prelude to 'the development of underdevelopment' rather than the catalyst for a new age or progress and prosperity.”
― T.M. Devine, The Scottish Nation: A History, 1700 - 2000