James W. Robertson > Quotes

“But I do like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that's always just below the surface. And I like the way you deal with religion. One century you're up to your lugs in it, the next you're trading the whole apparatus in for Sunday superstores. Praise the Lord and thrash the bairns. Ask and ye shall have the door shut in your face. Blessed are they that shop on the Sabbath, for they shall get the best bargains. Oh yes, this is a very fine country.”
― James Robertson

“I never savoured life for what it was: I only wanted to get to the next stage of it. I wish now I'd taken a little more time, but it is too late for such regrets. I was like the child in the cinema whose chief anticipation lies not in the film but in wondering what he will do after it is over; I was the reader who hurries through a 500-page novel not to see what will happen but simply to get to the end.”
― James W. Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack

“for what is religion if not a kind of madness, and what is madness without a touch of religion?”
― James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack

“This is the hard lesson of my life: love is not in us from the beginning, like an instinct; love is no more original to human beings than sin. Like sin, it must be learned.”
― James W. Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack

“I have walked and run through this world pretending emotions rather than feeling them. Oh, I could feel pain, physical pain, but I had to imagine joy, sorrow, anger. As for love, I didn't know what it meant. But I learned early to keep myself well disguised.”
― James W. Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack

“Everybody has a still, sheer place in them where light doesn’t penetrate. It”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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