George Mackay Brown Quotes

The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.

We never find what we set out hearts on. We ought to be glad of that.

Old wisdom out of the cluster of gathering shadows.

Without the story - in which everyone living, unborn, and dead, participates - men are no more than 'bits of paper blown on the cold wind . . .

The disjuncture from politics, on the other hand, springs from something which concerns all these poets: the shattered nature of Scottish consciousness, which isn't a low flat floor of peasant culture on which all stand together but a wild junk-yard of high culture fragments, English imports, oral traditions of 'the Scots commons' and proletarian 'socialist realism' from the thirties.

Touch the stone,' said Beliah, 'and you will touch "reality", or what the ignorant of all ages think "reality" is. That kind of truth will kill you, man. You won't see morning! I have kept you all your life from such things as remorse, terror, pity. Touch the stone, and those same angels will change you into an old poor pathetic deluded dying creature. Hubert, a nurse has to shave you, your hand shakes so much. You know that don't you? You dribble at every orifice, Hubert. You've begun to smell this past year or two...' He suddenly howled as if I had actually touched the stone,'YOU WILL BE RAVAGED IN FIRES OF GRACE!' I heard Nurse McGregor in the next ward. 'Good evening,' came her cheerful voice to the looney who had strangled his sweetheart and then buried her in his garden. 'Is it cocoa tonight, or tea, or milk?" Beliah was weeping. Outside the eaves dripped. The whole earth was drenched with the grief of Beliah. He wept inside me. I felt his marvellous tears on my face.

What is the lost cry in the heart of the earth? I am wounded. I have taken a wound in my flesh. The lips of it will never come together. Fire has been thrust deep in the wound. My flesh is branded.

I set a line and looked back at the valley. It was like a green open hand among the hills. The cliffs stood near and far, red, gray, black. In the valley chimneys began to smoke, one of them mine. Ingi was up. A green offering hand, our valley, corn-giver, fire-giver, water-giver, keeper of men and beasts. The other hand that fed us was this blue hand of the sea, which was treacherous, which had claws to it, which took more than ever it gave. Today it was peaceable enough. Blue hand and green hand lay together, like praying, in the summer dawn.

Yes, and what widows would stand on the shore at Rackwick this night and every night till all the bodies were found? Bella of The Harp and Jess of Topmast and Margaret-Ann of Sheepsay and Willa of Two-Waters and Mary of Hawkfell and Sara of Malthouse and Amos's Rachel with the unborn child in her, dark shrouded figures among the round red rocks of the beach. Night would come down from the hills on them, still their eyes would stare at this moving thing and that small glimmer out in the bay, bits of driftwood only, fleeting phosphorescence. They would shake their heads to one another. Then it would be too dark to know sea from land. They would walk home separately across the steep fields. Then in the lamplight an unfolding of shrouds, an opening of black bibles, a stony intentness of grief.