And the Land Lay Still Quotes

“There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it.

Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“She was convinced the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich country set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked the financial and architechtural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed larger cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“They were ashamed of it, or at least they didn’t think we should have it. The future was English. My grandad is dead no, but last year I went to my granny and said to her, in Gaelic, why did you hide it from us? And when she realised how much I could speak she started crying. She said they’d thought it was for the best. Gaelic would handicap us. But now I speak nothing but Gaelic to her and she loves it. I’m learning loads from her. I’m not fluent yet, but I’m getting close.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“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

“What fortunate is that! To live in this beautiful country and be old and healthy and be with someone you love and respect every minute of the day, every day of the week. What fortune is that!”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“All stories are lies, Mike. The secret is to work out how big the light is. That’s why we keep believing in a thing called truth. It doesn’t exist but we can’t help looking for it. It’s one of the most endearing of human failings.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Only the land will remain. People dug it and cut it and burned it and built on it but the land remained. ‘It is we who must reconcile ourselves to the stones, not the stones to us.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“And if it taks tanks and bullets and mass arrests to convince the people what’s good for them, can it be aw that good for them?”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“You’d escaped because everybody else was hell-bent on wanting everything and you saw it wasn’t going to work…..
It wasn’t the age of small nations as you thought, it was the age of money and waste and garbage and pollution and destruction and it was all going to get worse,….”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“The things that have been put in place in the last five years – National Insurance, pensions, the Health Service – these were changes for the good, they made ordinary people’s lives better, safer, happier and longer. Any government that tried to undo them, Don believed, would risk the wrath of the people.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“This was Scotland in 1950: coast to coast Jock Tamson's bairns stood or sat, lugs cocked to the wireless for news from home and abroad, from Borlanslogie, from Korea, or tuned in for The McFlannels on a Saturday night, or It's All Yours on a Monday with young Jimmy Logan doing the daft laddie Sammy Dreep, sluttering 'Sausages is the boys!' This was Scotland in 1950: land of 250 pits and 80,000 colliers, 100,000 farmworkers and four universities: land of Singer sewing machines in Clydebank, the Saxone Shoe Company in Kilmarnock, Cox Brothers jute mills in Dundee and the North British Locomotive Company in Springburn, every town and city and every part of every city with it own industries and hard-won skills... This was the land of Leyland Tiger buses from Thurso to Dalbeattie, and double-deckers crowding the city trams towards oblivion, or grandiose department stores and miserable slums, tearooms and single-ends, savage sectarianism and gloomy gentility, no-quarter football and stultifying Sundays.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“The way you’re already penalised if you don’t pay your gas bill by direct debit, or the way they give you a discount if you’re rich enough to pay your house insurance in a oner. The world we fought for, Don thinks bitterly, and then, as he always does now, he shrugs it off. Not his problem.”
― James W. Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“With each generation there is less contact – real, physical touch – with the tools, the materials, even the products of its labour.”
― James W. Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“he smoked Woodbines ferociously, right down to the nip, and his thumb and forefinger were yellow and hard where the tobacco burned them.”
― James W. Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“All over the city there was hypocrisy, and irony, and heroism: fabulous views from despoiled viewpoints, squalor and refinement propping each other up, dissolution in progress behind impregnable façades, and dreams of glory in crumbling tenements.”
― James W. Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“I’m not sure. That’s the point. There’s a tyranny about beginnings and endings and the routes between them but we seem to like being tyrannised. And I’ve been wondering if I could do it differently.”
― James W. Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Miss Pearson was suspicious of volunteers since they usually had ideas above their station, but she also knew Ellen to be her most precocious pupil and that it was better to lift the lid off her occasionally than have her bouncing like a steamy pudding at her desk,”
― James W. Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“The Royal Commission had the added advantage that it would take years to come to any conclusion and any conclusion it came to would probably be inconclusive.”
― James W. Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Everybody has a still, sheer place in them where light doesn’t penetrate. It”
― James W. Robertson, And the Land Lay Still