Orkney Quotes

“Now he understood what it was to be a man: that it was to be weak as well as strong, to be foolish sometimes and wise sometimes, to know love as well as to kill. And he had learned that there were other paths for him, other gods who called in the deep places of the earth, in the lap of wavelets on the shore, in the breath of the wind. He had learned that there were other kinds of courage. He knew, with deep certainty, that the islands held a new path for him. He need only move forward and find it.”
― Juliet Marillier, Wolfskin

“The King’s daughter, the Princess Gemdelovely must be given to the Stoorworm.”
― Walter Traill Dennison, Assipattle and the Mester Stoorworm: The Legendary Scottish ‘Dragon Slayer’ Folktale

“Without the story - in which everyone living, unborn, and dead, participates - men are no more than 'bits of paper blown on the cold wind . . .”
― George Mackay Brown, Winter Tales

“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.”
― George Mackay Brown, A Time To Keep and Other Stories

“No Orkney weather lasts long, and you can see new weather coming a long way off. There are frequent scraps of rainbow. And birds. At any point you can stop walking, or pull over and lower the car window and hear the cries of peewits and tremulous curlews.”
― Kathleen Jamie, Findings

“Did you know Orkney was a favorite stop of Viking ships along their voyages?"
"She's been at the almanac again," her sire said dryly.
Rohan succumbed to a fond grin. "Our little bluestocking.”
― Gaelen Foley, My Dangerous Duke

“What astonishes us about Earl Patrick's castle works is the extraordinary beauty and refinement of their architecture. At all of them it is obvious that he employed the same architect. And it is equally obvious that this architect was an artist of the first rank, with a scholarly ans sensitive acquaintance and understanding contemporary design, particularly in France. Yet this group of buildings, so beautiful and so refined, were erected to serve the tyrannical purposes of the worst scoundrel of his time in Scotland.”
― William Douglas Simpson, The Bishop's and Earl's Palace, Kirkwall, Orkney

“The Orkney I was born into was a place where there was no great distinction between the ordinary and the fabulous; the lives of living men turned into legend.”
― Edwin Muir, An Autobiography