Laura (Reading is a Doing Word)

“Here is a situation: a country that is not fully a country, a nation that does not quite believe itself to be a nation, exists within, and as a small and distant part of, a greater state. The greater state was once a very great state, with its own empire. It is no longer great, but its leaders and many of its people like to believe it is. For the people of the less-than country, the not-quite nation, there are competing, conflicting loyalties. The are confused. For generations a kind of balance has been maintained. There has been give and take, and, yes, there have been arguments about how much give and how much take, but now something has changed. There is a sense of injustice, of neglect, of the real operation. Nobody is being shot, there are no political prisoners, there is very little censorship, but still that sense persists: this is wrong. It grows. It demands to be addressed. The situation needs to be fixed.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Only the land will remain. People dug it and cut it and burned it and built on it but the land remained. ‘It is we who must reconcile ourselves to the stones, not the stones to us.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“It takes a lifetime, sometimes, to work out what anything you're doing's got to do with the real realities of living.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff

“We can't solve it. But we can still salve it.”
― Ali Smith, Gliff