Emma McDowall

“It all comes back to one thing... brutality. Compel people into a position where they have to use the brute that's in them in order to live and the brute will waken all right. When the brute is naturally strong in a man - that's the man who becomes the leader of the pressgang. And there you have it. Where all is compulsion and enforcement, it's the bully that rules.”
― Neil M. Gunn

“We cannot buy it. We are too poor. Then men who have made the law have taken our own drink from us, and have not left us wherewith to buy it. Yet they can buy it, because they are rich. I have a feeling that that is not just. I do not grudge them their riches and all it can buy for them.”
― Neil M. Gunn, Young Art and Old Hector: A Novel

“In these few seconds Finn lived such a long time, that the marble fell back into the bottom of an exhausted world.”
― Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings

“Surely love, if there was any such thing, should be ease and tenderness...”
― Neil M. Gunn, The Silver Darlings