The Scottish Book Quotes & Sayings

The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form ... I didn't know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. — Lena Dunham

I was a bookworm. Every week I'd go to the library and get seven books. Remember libraries? I wonder if people still go. And I learned about everything from the library. I came from a Scottish family. Old school. — Colin Mochrie

Excellence matters, and technology advances so fast that the potential for improvement is tremendous. So, since becoming CEO again, I've pushed hard to increase our velocity, improve our execution, and focus on the big bets that will make a difference in the world. — Larry Page

Some change imperceptibly, little by little, others quickly and once and for all, but everyone changes, and for that reason it is in vain to ask whose fate is the best. My — Leena Krohn

I hadn't even released my first proper single when I started to feel the strain of attention. But I don't believe that it was the attention that was giving me panic attacks. I think it was everything in my life colliding at the same time. It really did get to a serious point where I couldn't even walk down the street without getting the pain. — Ellie Goulding

Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time. — Stephen Richards

The point of this book is that being Scottish is more than just a matter of nationality or place of origin or clan or even culture. It is also a state of mind, a way of viewing the world and our place in it. — Arthur Herman

For a whole generation after the battle of Pydna, the Roman state enjoyed a profound calm, scarcely varied by a ripple here and there on the surface. — Theodor Mommsen

The man who does ill, ill must suffer too. — Aeschylus

This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it. — Neil Gaiman

There is no getting away from the fact, he is one of only a few screws in the system who are the real McCoy. Anyone reading this book who has spent time in Scottish prisons will no doubt agree, this chimp is up for it just as much as the prisoners. I personally would love to see more screws like him, as he doesn't bother with all this shitty report piss. If you want to fight him, he comes into your cell, one-on-one, man-to-man. — Stephen Richards

Will there ever be an encyclopedia? Possibly. I would say two things about the encyclopedia: firstly, I've always said and I stand by it, whenever I do do a printed encyclopedia I would like all the proceeds to go to charity. Back in 1998 I never dreamt I personally I would be in the position that I could set up a large charitable foundation and personally do things for charity, and I've done other charity books already. — J.K. Rowling

I've often been asked; how do you rob a bank? The answer to that is that there is no instruction book. The fact is you never know what will happen when you step through the door of a bank and declare yourself. Certainly, you can work hard on preparations; have everything organised from vehicles to weapons and set out the getaway, but there are no set rules. — Stephen Richards

More of a QUESTION: When I was in high school in the 1980's I read a book but cannot remember the name. It had a spooky green cover with a german shepherd like dog on it and I seem to remember it being about ghosts or something in the English countryside -although it could have been Irish or Wales or Scottish. Does anyone else remember this book and can you tell me the name? I would love to reread it since it set me on my path to my LOVE if reading. — M.D. Robinson

Let the whole world knock. I'm not opening that door. — Emm Cole

She looked to be maybe fifteen, give or take a year or two; still somewhere in that nether realm between childhood and womanhood. Her hair, to judge by the few unsoiled strands he could see, was an earthy brown, and her eyes shone with a blue-green hue so liquid that he almost expected to see waves. A small, ever-so-slightly upturned nose sat in the center of a slender face. — Ari Marmell

There are no teachers, saints, prophets, good people, but the artists. — Virginia Woolf

He set his whisky tumbler on the table, but kept his fingers around it. "What do you see in my eyes?"...
"Tell me, lass," he urged softly.
She suddenly understood the term 'old soul,' because one sat before her now. And, as if opening a book, she caught a glimpse of Asher. The words then tumbled out of her mouth. "Endlessness. Sorrow. Agony. Distress. Rage. — Donna Grant

The sensation burst over her, flames and sparks, stars, and all that was holy. She clung to him, blinded by the sun above her, feeling like the light had entered her veins to sing through her book, lift her high above the earth. — Lecia Cornwall

My own experience of growing up as a Roman Catholic in Scotland has led me to fear independence in Scotland. The possibility of Scotland being a kind of Stormont is a real one. I wrote a book recently about Neil Lennon's year of living dangerously and in the course of it I had to revisit some of my own experiences. Of course, most Scottish people are not swivel-eyed, loyalist sectarians but there are a large number of them. A large six-figure number, and if I were living in Scotland as a Roman Catholic I would be worried about that. — George Galloway

Some time ago a little-known Scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. The Wealth of Nations is still being read today. With the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have retackled this same question for our own times. Two centuries from now our great-great- ... -great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading Why Nations Fail. — George Akerlof

Anger is my biggest enemy in life. — Mike Tyson

The Teachers, even of Christianity, are in general, the most ignorant of the true meaning of that which they teach. There is no book of which so little is known as the Bible. To most who read it, it is as incomprehensible as the Sohar. p. 105 — Pike, Albert

It was beguiling to live in a country, Scotland, that didn't look enough like itself to be a location for its own movies ... I remember consulting a film book and discovering that Arthur Freed decided to shoot Brigadoon in Hollywood because nowhere in Scotland looked Scottish enough. — Andrew O'Hagan