Shetland Quotes

“Some men fall in love with a woman,
Some women fall in love with a man,
Some men fall in love with another man,
Some women fall in love with another woman -
But I, my dear one, fell in love with Shetland.

- Shetland”
― Jackie Kay, Red, Cherry Red

“But you have to remember, Shetland time is slower. There's a saying, that Shetland watches don't show minutes or hours-only years!”
― Avalina Kreska, The AdderStane

“The winters were so bleak and black that in the summer folk were overtaken with a kind of frenzy, constant activity. There was the feeling that you had to make the most of it, be outside, enjoy it before the dark days came again. Here in Shetland they called it the 'simmer dim'.”
― Ann Cleeves, White Nights

“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

“Vast rivers, the kind that flow through continents and look like seas at their widest points, hold a particular fascination for me, as do trains. The reason is simple: we don't have these things in Shetland, and I hope the childlike awe I feel on a riverbank, or watching an intercity train swoosh across a high bridge, will never fade. Best, of course, when the two are combined.

About a hundred miles southwest of Kharkiv the train had slowed, and I watched from the window, totally transfixed, as we clunked across a bridge that seemed to stretch on and on over the dark river. Lights glimmered, reassuring, in the distance. There are many bridges which knit the city of Dnipro together, taking trains and traffic across both the Dnipro and Samara rivers. The city sprawls at their confluence.”
― Jen Stout, Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War

“In this light, at this time of the year, on impulse visitors bought up the old houses for second homes.”
― Ann Cleeves, White Nights

“It intrigued me that literary people raved about the poems MacDiarmid wrote while living in Shetland, especially 'On a Raised Beach', while I found them hard to appreciate. As a Shetlander and a geographer who knew the place fairly intimately, including the steep storm beaches (and lack of post-glacial isostatic uplift necessary for raised beaches), I found his battering-ram approach to using geological terminology a bit indigestible. We all have moments of epiphany when we discover something profound, and I suppose that may have been the feeling he tried to convey but, along with what felt like garbled geomorphology, theology and - in my 'book' - the heinous crime of exoticising the Shaetlan tongue and its ancestry in the Norn language, it all felt a bit contrived, as if skiting the surface. But meanwhile, living and working in Edinburgh, I was learning to keep my mouth shut, and that any criticism of MacDiarmid's poetry was unthinkable. So I ungraciously joined the ranks of those who 'quite liked a few of his early lyrics' to get me off the hook.”
― Christine De Luca, Ayont the Thistle: A gallimaufry of poetry and prose to mark the centenary (1926 - 2026) of Hugh MacDiarmid's 'A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle'