Legend in Green Velvet Quotes

“Sssh.” James’s voice was a thin thread of sound. “Look there.” He must have heard some sound her city-bred ears had not caught, for the beam of the flashlight cut cleanly through the dark and caught the animal unawares. Susan had a fantastic, flashing glimpse of a sinuous tawny body and long ringed tail, of pricked ears and twitching whiskers. The fat, fuzzy paws were outsized, like those of a kitten. Then the big cat lifted its lip in a silent snarl and was gone. “A wildcat,” James said. “One doesn’t see them often. Nothing to be alarmed about; he’d go underground to avoid us if he could. The only predator that looks for a fight is man.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“The area was thick with castles—ruined castles, their fanged walls perched on crags; small, homey castles, still inhabited, on the shores of deep-blue lochs; large, impressive castles, whose gray stone battlements were circled by lovely gardens. Burns and lochs and castles and moors; the glimpse of a graceful dun shape—a stag—moving on delicate leisured hooves through a shadowed clearing, until the wind brought their scent to his dilated nostrils and he took off in a great leap; larks tossing high in the blue heavens; plover and grouse and other birds Susan had never seen before.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“In the States people leave the lights on to deter burglars,” Susan said. “We even have automatic switches that turn them on and off at certain times.” “We, too, are in the modern age,” James snapped. “But no Scot is going to waste electricity when he isn’t there.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“But if it’s a trap—” “Then we’ll spring it—and hopefully hoist our friend by his own petard. Thank God for Shakespeare,” James added meanly. “A poet who wasn’t a Scot.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“The dreamers and the romantics are the people who make history—not the dull clods like you. The mystics, who founded the world’s great religions; the explorers who discovered new worlds because they believed the legends the hardheaded realists jeered at; artists and poets and musicians, creating beauty out of their dreams….”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“Well, they’re your ancestors. It wasn’t until the fifth century that the Scotti came over from Ireland and established the kingdom of Dalriada in southwest Scotland. They fought the Picts and intermarried with them for centuries, until Kenneth MacAlpine defeated the last Pictish king and became king of the Scots and the Picts in 824.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“Where am I?” Susan asked plaintively. James swallowed the last of his sandwich. “Somewhere in the Grampians,” he answered. “We’re heading for the Perthshire-Invernessshire border, where the Sow of Atholl and the Boar of Badenoch lift snow-clad heights out of the mist. The bleak Pass of Drumochter, fifteen hundred feet high, marks a land of trackless wastes, uninhabited save by the deer and the grouse, the wildcat and the eagle!”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“And in Mary’s day the Highland chiefs would have worn their belted plaids—inconvenient garments that had to be pleated by hand each time they were put on. The wearer would lie down on the pleated section and, somehow or other, get a belt around his hips to hold the pleats in place. The unpleated upper part of the long rectangle of cloth was stuffed up under his coat, and the ends were wrapped around his shoulders. It must have been worse than putting on a girdle, Susan thought, walking on. A Highland chief caught without his plaid by an enemy would simply have to fight in his shirt, or in his bare hide. A philabeg, or small kilt, as the short, permanently pleated garment was called, would have been much handier….”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“So what if the Bonnie Prince had died a fat, dissipated drunkard? So what if the clansmen who had sacrificed their lives and fortunes for his cause were not chivalrous gentlemen in kilts, but unwashed, illiterate cattle rustlers? The legend of the laughing, fair-haired prince and his gallant Highlanders was immortal.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“She recognized the lines, of course. Her years of absorption in the romances of Scotland had not been wasted, and this was one of the most romantic of all the legends. The plaintive prisoner’s lament had been written by a king—James I of Scotland, held captive by the English through most of his childhood. The “King’s Quair,” written in captivity, was a love poem as well as a lament. Peering pensively from his barred window, James had seen a lady walking in the garden: And therewith kest I doun my eye ageyne, Quhare as I sawe, walking under the tour, Full secretly new cummyn hir to pleyne, The fairest or the freschest yong floure That ever I sawe, me thoght, before that houre. The fair young flower was Joan Beaufort, a niece of the English king, and when James was released he brought her home to Scotland with him as his bride. At least, so the legend ran.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“She ran and swam and rode her bike as energetically as her friends, but her daydreams were peopled with shadowy warriors and princes. In high school, while her girlfriends were swooning over football players and TV heroes, she hid in the heather with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and allowed him to kiss her hand before he left her forever.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“The stuffy little room in her hotel held no charms; it was just a place to sleep in, and she recalled the single overhead bulb pessimistically. Why didn’t hotels furnish decent reading lamps? Presumably because most people didn’t read. But what else were they supposed to do in a hotel, especially on a Sunday evening in Edinburgh, where the Sabbath was properly observed?”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“Edinburgh is three different cities: the drab, sprawling suburbs of the recent past; the elegant, formal squares of the eighteenth-century town; and, dominating the skyline, the tangled closes and wynds of the ancient capital. From the heights of Castle Rock, more than four hundred feet above sea level, the old streets slant down toward the foot of Arthur’s Seat; and the mile-long slopes are crowded with buildings whose turreted, gabled, and towered roofs form a skyline unsurpassed in any city of the world.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands

“Much you know about it,” Susan said disagreeably. “James Bond eats all the time. He thinks he’s a gourmet or something. He gives people karate chops if they shake his martinis ten times instead of twelve. Not that I blame him. I mean, being chased and scared and beaten up uses up a lot of energy. If I ever write a suspense story, I’ll have my people eating lots.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Legend in Green Velvet: A Scottish Romantic Suspense Thriller of Murder, Peril, and Obsession in the Misty Highlands