Neil M. Gunn > Quotes

“It all comes back to one thing... brutality. Compel people into a position where they have to use the brute that's in them in order to live and the brute will waken all right. When the brute is naturally strong in a man - that's the man who becomes the leader of the pressgang. And there you have it. Where all is compulsion and enforcement, it's the bully that rules.”
― Neil M. Gunn

“Knowledge is high in the head, but the salmon of wisdom swims deep”
― Neil Gunn

“We have to combine, certainly, but if we combine to fight on the idea of each man making more money for himself, then we end by fighting one another. And that's the trouble now... human dealings are founded - founded - not on money but on what is fair and just all round.”
― Neil M. Gunn

“Surely love, if there was any such thing, should be ease and tenderness...”
― Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings

“What a great and happy place the world was! But you had to be big and grown-up before you could do just what you liked.”
― Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings

“You would think," added Art, "that a wedding was a great thing."
"Well," replied Old Hector, "it's not a small thing, as a rule. They contrive, one way or another, to make a lot of it.”
― Neil M. Gunn

“And whenever the prime concern in life is money-making, then you have trickery and brutality and wrong. I'm saying that, not from what I have heard, but from what I have observed in a long life among our own folk.”
― Neil M. Gunn

“It is a lovely strath. The flat river lands widen and narrow, the path goes by and through hazel woods where nuts ripen in harvest weather, discloses sudden meadows where rabbits look and vanish, swerves round and on, but ever holds by the river. The slopes that shut out the strath from the moors are steep and wooded to their summits.

It is not a glen of the mountains, craggy, stupendous, physically impressive. There is nothing here to overwhelm the romantic mind. Its beauty is an inward grace in oneself akin to what is indefinable in the memory of a masterpiece. Beauty, intimate and secretive, has a lingering, lovely mirth; at the core of it, hope and fulfilment meet and tread a measure; while heads turn with glistening eyes to look for any or no excuse to laugh. In some such mood the Creator must have looked upon his handiwork and called it good.”
― Neil M. Gunn, Highland River

“...an' there never yet was speculation but in the long run, it meant smash. Ye run so hard that ye fall ower yoursel”
― Neil M. Gunn

“The round-backed cottages clung to the earth like long animals whose folded heads were always to the mountain. Lying thus to the slopes they were part of the rhythm of the land itself... There were little herds of these cottages at long intervals, and every now and then a cottage by itself like a wandered beast...”
― Neil M. Gunn, Butcher's Broom

“in a few moments he came into the core of himself, where he was alone, and felt strangely companioned, not by anyone or anything, but by himself. The rejected self found refuge here, not a cowed refuge, but somehow a wandering ease; as if it were indestructible, and had its own final pride, its own secret eyes.”
― Neil M. Gunn

“We cannot buy it. We are too poor. Then men who have made the law have taken our own drink from us, and have not left us wherewith to buy it. Yet they can buy it, because they are rich. I have a feeling that that is not just. I do not grudge them their riches and all it can buy for them.”
― Neil M. Gunn, Young Art and Old Hector: A Novel

“In these few seconds Finn lived such a long time, that the marble fell back into the bottom of an exhausted world.”
― Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings

“In Kildonan there is today a shadow, a chill of which any sensitive mind would, I am convinced, be vaguely aware, though possessing no knowledge of the clearances. We are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed.”
― Neil M. Gunn, Landscape and Light: Essays by Neil M. Gunn

“Fiona MacLeod! There will ever be a grain of bitterness in my acknowledgement of him, or of Yeats, or of any of the modern Celtic twilighters, an irritable impatience of their pale fancies, their posturing sonorities and follies. Yet on a certain side they are 'getting' me, and sometimes a phrase, a thought, has positively uncanny, mesmeric power over my very flesh.

This sort of dream poetry is clearly a drug, and of the most insidious... Then poetry casts its net, its iridescent net, and the silvery fish of intellect is meshed in the music of lost days and beauties forgone.”
― Neil M. Gunn, Half-Light

“As the Sun put a circle round the earth and all that it contained, so a man by his vision put a circle round himself. At the centre of this circle his spirit sat, and at the centre of his spirit was a serenity for ever watchful. Sometimes the watchfulness gave an edge of joy in holding at bay the demons and even the vengeful lesser gods, and sometimes it meged with the Sun's light into pure timeless joy.”
― Neil M. Gunn, Sun Circle