Picts 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

“Scott saw its ludicrous proportions; and it is likely that posterity will remember the Pictish question in the discussion between Monkbarns and Sir Arthur Wardour after the volumes of Whitaker, Goodall, Pinkerton, Chalmers, Ritter, and Grant have been long entombed in their proper shelves.”
― John Hill Burton

“As Smollett relates, Dumbarton has always sat on the edge of something. Historically, it has marked the line between the Romans and Picts, between the Picts and Britons, and between Highlands and Lowlands. The area has been a geographic, social, cultural, linguistic, agricultural and economic border zone for millennia. This liminal status seems to fascinate Smollett, and he returns to it again and again in his writing.”
― Craig Smith, The Scottish Enlightenment: Human Nature, Social Theory and Moral Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Christopher J. Berry

“These great Nordic incursions were to result in the marginalization of the once semi-autonomous Pictish, English and North British Princedoms that had preceded the arrival of the Norsemen on British soil. And, as they disappeared beneath the onslaught of the Viking Hosts, the ancient bardic traditions, which had once been succoured by these previously distinct ethnic groups, gradually became intertwined with one another as a result of widespread migration, inter-marriage and cross fertilization; the ultimate legacy of which was the perpetuation of the fragmentary remains of the ancient traditions which were to come to adorn the ballads that the Laird of Abbotsford himself collected, amongst the eighteenth century descendants of these ancient peoples.”
― Rupert Ferguson, The Lay of the Last Minstrel: Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrel Tradition

“Why resist the Iona hypthesis? In part to play devil's advocate, but mostly because the wit, verve and apparent sponteneity - the daredevil quality of the Book of Kells is not in evidence in Iona. It is, however, abundantly present in Pictish sculpture, and thanks to new research we now know that Pictland has a monastic site that once rivalled Iona.”
― Victoria Whitworth, The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma

“Where did the Picts live? Might they still be here? The Romans were so scared of them they built a wall. Two walls, by orders of two emperors after they successively failed to frighten them into passivity. And now the Celtic Supremicists. Is there nothing this part of the world will stop at to create its own agenda?”
― Deirdre Chapman, Badlands