Martha Ironside Quotes

“Martha Ironside was nine years old when she kicked her great-aunt Josephine. At nineteen she loved the old lady, idly perhaps, in her natural humour, as she loved the sky and space. At twenty-four, when Miss Josephine Leggatt died, aged seventy-nine and reluctant, Martha knew that it she who had taught her wisdom; thereby proving - she reflected - that man does not learn from books alone; because Martha had kicked Aunt Josephine (at the age of nine) for taking her from her books.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“Martha said it over and over to herself: "Scotland is bounded on the south by England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the Arory-bory-Alice, and on the west by Eternity."

...She repeated the boundaries of Scotland with the same satisfaction as she repeated the rivers of Spain. Up to her University days she carried the conviction that there was something about Scotland in the Bible.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“But oftner the nights were clear, marvellously lit. Darkness was a pale lustrous gloom. Sometimes the north was silver clear, so luminous that through the filigree of leaf and sapling its glow pierced burning, as though the light were a patterned loveliness standing out against the background of the trees. Later the glow dulled and the trees became the pattern against the background of the light. The hushed world took her in. Tranqil, surrendered, she became one with the vast quiet night. A puddock sprawled noiselessly towards her, a bat swooped, tracing gigantic patterns upon the sky, a corncrake scraighed, on and on through the night, monotonous and forgotten as one forgets the monotony of the sea's roar; and when the soft wind was in the south-west, the sound of the river, running among its stony rapids below the ferry, floated up and over her like a tide. She fell asleep to its running and wakened to listen for it; and heard it as one hears the breathing of another.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood