Edinburgh Quotes

“Into no other city does the sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon your walk; and the place is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery.  You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back-window of a grimy tenement in a lane:—and behold! you are face-to-face with distant and bright prospects.  You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills.  You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes

“The drinking dens are spilling out
There's staggering in the square
There's lads and lasses falling about
And a crackling in the air
Down around the dungeon doors
The shelters and the queues
Everybody's looking for
Somebody's arms to fall into
And it's what it is
It's what it is now

There's frost on the graves and the monuments
But the taverns are warm in town
People curse the government
And shovel hot food down
The lights are out in the city hall
The castle and the keep
The moon shines down upon it all
The legless and asleep

And it's cold on the tollgate
With the wagons creeping through
Cold on the tollgate
God knows what I could do with you
And it's what it is
It's what it is now

The garrison sleeps in the citadel
With the ghosts and the ancient stones
High up on the parapet
A Scottish piper stands alone
And high on the wind
The highland drums begin to roll
And something from the past just comes
And stares into my soul

And it's cold on the tollgate
With the Caledonian Blues
Cold on the tollgate
God knows what I could do with you
And it's what it is
It's what it is now
What it is
It's what it is now

There's a chink of light, there's a burning wick
There's a lantern in the tower
Wee Willie Winkie with a candlestick
Still writing songs in the wee wee hours
On Charlotte Street I take
A walking stick from my hotel
The ghost of Dirty Dick
Is still in search of Little Nell
And it's what it is
It's what it is now
Oh what it is
What it is now”
― Mark Knopfler, Sailing to Philadelphia

“There were legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties, women from the age of thirty and upward, who crowded into their war-bereaved spinsterhood with voyages of discovery into new ideas and energetic practices in art and social welfare, education or religion.”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“Age makes most girls into women, but men never really stop being boys.”
― Irvine Welsh, Porno

“[...] there were other people's Edinburghs quite different from hers [...]”
― Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“We're all confused youths, pal. We just get better at covering it up.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Long Knives

“Skinner nodded thoughtfully, then regaining his composure contended, - I've got to say that with the book, it was the snagging bits that interested me most.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

“Skinner nodded thoughtfully, then regaining his composure contended, - I've got to say that with the book, it was the shagging bits that interested me most.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

“We may feel more sorry for the sad, self-loathing alcoholic than the bombastic one who thinks the whole world is out of step bar him, but by and large they're the same creature.”
― Irvine Welsh, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

“She starts screaming at him now, calling him a Nazi n a fascist n aw that shite that posh students like tae call people, usually cause thir away fae hame fir the first time n they discover that they hate thir ma n dad and cannae handle it.”
― Irvine Welsh, Glue

“Yuv goat tae huv crap sex occasionally, just tae git some perspective oan the barry shaggin. If every ride wis textbook porno, then it would be meaningless, cause thir'd be nae real reference point. That's the wey ye huv tae look at it.”
― Irvine Welsh, Glue

“Accidents've goat a habit ay happening when ye act like an erse.”
― Irvine Welsh, Glue

“doubled back to one of the cute indie coffeeshops that have sprung up all over the area like middle-class chickenpox. I see a latte has crossed the three- pound mark in Edinburgh. Thieving fucking bastards, honestly. I definitely can't afford a croissant too. It is great coffee, mind”
― Juno Dawson, Stay Another Day

“The most prominent middle-class groups were not directly involved in relations of production with the manual working class, but were engaged in the professions, wholesale and retail distribution, commerce and finance. The industrial structure was itself heterogeneous, with a considerable amount of smaller-scale labour-intensive industry and a consequent diffusion of ownership.”
― Robert Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh

“Thus cooperation and trust make contracts work, not the other way round. Outsourcing contracts rest on the fundamental failure to draw the distinction between statistically calculable risk and fundamental uncertainty. Handling the latter is manifestly the role of the state. There is a 'fantasy of controllability' over future costs which appears to shield the state from risk, while leaving it vulnerable to future uncertainty (like Carillion). This leads to blame shifting when things go wrong. The then-Prime Minister Theresa May's argument (16 January 2018) that 'the government is just another customer of Carillion', like many others, fails to acknowledge the prime role of the state as the political vehicle for handling uncertainty.”
― David McCrone, Who Runs Edinburgh?

“A surprising, audacious and impudent attempt was made last Saturday by several people of this town to celebrate the birthday of the Pretender's son; the women distinguished themselves by wearing tartan gowns with shoes and stockings of the same kind, and white ribbands on their heads and breasts; dinners were bespoke at Leith with an intent to have balls afterwards.”
― Willem van Keppel

“It's easy to identify tourists on Edinburgh's Royal mile.
They're the ones bound in knitted scarves, wearing puffa jackets and woolly hats no matter the time of the year.
When the wind whistles around the New Town's handsome Georgian streets, their stoic faces show the effort of turning away from its bite.”
― Gabriella Bennett, The Art of Coorie: How to Live Happy the Scottish Way

“All Fergusson's verses, indeed all humanist verse, has within it an eligiac seam; always present beneath the surface is the assumption that the world is imperfect, that it has fallen from grace. As with the disintegrating Tory ideal in the country, there is in Fergusson's poetry an ideal, imagined city of the past, hopelessly toppling as the new Babylon lays down its foundations: city of chaos, dirt, noise, broken communication, luxury, disorder. In essence the poet follows in his representation the timeless humanist imperative, attempting 'to create order out of disorder, and to make sense of life'. Hallow-Fair and Leith Races to a degree make just such a clear demarcation between the two cities of past and present in their thesis - antithesis structures. The two cities embody two different Scottish cultures: Auld Reekie, the pastoral, civilised, humanist culture; and Edina, the Athens of the North, but more often, Babylon, the counter-pastoral, brutal, Whig culture. Hallow-Fair, Leith Races, The Election, The King's Birth-Day in Edinburgh, satirise the new Babylon; the poems of this group celebrate an older Scotland, and Auld Reekie, in the same eligiac vein as The Daft Days. Yet, as we have seen, the poet, at times, undermines too rigorous a humanist position: demarcations are not all that clear; ideals don't always elevate the human codition; the endless wheel of change and creativity, diversity and unrest, may be forging themselves into a new order.”
― F.W. Freeman, Robert Fergusson and the Scots Humanist Compromise

“Auld Reekie's sons blyth faces wear,
September's merry month is near,
That brings in Neptune's caller chere,
New oysters fresh;
The halesomest and nicest gear
Of fish or flesh.

Whan big as burns the gutters rin,
Gin ye hae catcht a drookit skin,
To Luckie Middlemist's loup in,
And sit fair snug
O'er oysters and a dram o' gin,
Or haddock lug.”
― Robert Fergusson, Poems of Fergusson

“Auld Reekie, Wale o' ilka Town,
That Scotland kens beneath the Moon,
Where couthy Chiels at E'ening meet
Their bizzing craigs and mous to weet;
And blythly gar auld Care gae bye
Wi' blinkit and wi' bleering Eye:”
― Robert Fergusson, Poems of Fergusson

“Great Drummond improveth what nature doth send,
To country and city he's always a friend.
Regardless of juntos, his lordship pursues
The weal of the public in all that he does;
Unwearied he studies the good of the town.
And success his labours for ever must crown.”
― Claudero, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, on Several Occasions, with large additions

“They came in Shoals from all Corners of the Kingdom to Edinburgh, Rich, Poor, Blind, and Lame, to lodge their subscriptions in the Company's House, and to have a Glimpse of the Man Paterson.”
― Walter Herries

“The whole city of Edinburgh poured down upon Leith, to see the colony depart, amidst the tears, and prayers, and praises of relations and friends, and of their countrymen. Many seamen and soldiers, whose services had been refused, because more had offered themselves than were needed, were found hid in the ships, and, when ordered ashore, clung to ropes and timbers, imploring to go, without reward, with their companions.”
― John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, Volume II

“In 1766, James Boswell, having returned from a grand tour accompanied by Rousseau's mistress, left London for his native Edinburgh, where he took his final law examination and joined the Scottish bar. Meanwhile, ensconced in the Advocate's Library, the Professor of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, Adam Ferguson, was completing his pioneering work, shortly to appear (despite David Hume's misgivings) as An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). These were heady days in the precincts of the Scottish Parliament Building, when cultural conversation in the Old Town was as high as the odours of its teeming streets. On 16th August 1773, Ferguson dined at Boswell's house, with Samuel Johnson who had just begun his Scottish journey. They debated the authenticity of Ossian's poetry, and their colleague, Lord Monboddo's ideas about human evolution, Johnson ridiculing the latter's notion that men once had tails.”
― Andrew Blaikie, The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory

“Edinburgh was, at the beginning of George III's reign, a picturesque, odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town of about seventy thousand inhabitants. A stranger approaching the city, seeing it piled 'close and massy, deep and high' - a series of towers, rising from a palace of the plain to a castle in the air - would have thought it a truly romantic place; and the impression would not have subsided much on a near inspection, when he would have found himself admitted by a fortified gate through an ancient wall, still kept in repair.”
― Robert Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh

“Miralles' parliament is therefore neither grand nor patrician. For those of us who work there, it feels more like a village - a natural continuation of the Royal Mile, with its marketplace in the Garden Lobby, and its nooks and crannies reflecting the vennels and closes of the Old Town of Edinburgh and the barrios of Barcelona.”
― George Reid, Creating a Scottish Parliament

“At the end of most streets of Edinburgh's Old Town rises the crimson wall of Salisbury Craigs, a lesson in the unimaginable forces and lapses of time which have gone to shape the world. The Craigs are a basalt intrusion, a fossil tide of volcanic rock which surged through the foundations of a dead volcano some 200 million years ago. Geology and paleontology, with their revelations of deep time and alien life-forms, towered up wherever 19th century Scots turned their eyes. the 'testimony of the rocks' threatened their moral universe, its narrative incompatible with a creation myth or even a creator... Old Edinburgh is shaped like a gigantic lecture theatre with the end wall covered by a chart of the earth's origins.”
― Neal Ascherson, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland

“If art can be likened to a river, then Edinburgh is a confluence where many tributaries meet.”
― Christina Jansen, Modern Masters XVIII

“The counter-culture was global - or so we thought. For the first time we felt in touch with California and Paris, Poland and India and together we would change the world. Even Edinburgh would move to a more open and humane and anarchic direction. It and we would be a tonic to the nation and the very idea of 'nation' would become irrelevant.

Scottish culture believed itself to be 'European' but surely it gloried in a powerful insularity too. And that was all to be moribund, this was a brave new world and we had no irony in that belief. The dystopias of Huxley and Orwell were forgotten - we now had the key to happiness. And surprisingly even now, it still seems we were doing the right thing and it was good.”
― Halla Beloff, Justified Sinners: An Archaeology of Scottish Counter Culture, 1960 - 2000

“[Walter Scott] lived in a hiatus, in a country which was neither a nation nor a province, and had, instead of a centre, a blank, an Edinburgh, in the middle of it.”
― Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer