The Complete Scottish Sketches of R.B. Cunninghame Graham Quotes

“Fell opportunity that has so often turned saints into sinners could have had no place upon the rocky islet in the lake. The voices of the sisters singing in the choir must have been scarce distinguishable from the lapping of the wavelets on the beach, or blending with them, made up a harmony, as if nature and man were joining in a pantheistic hymn. Nuns may have lived upon the Island with, or without vocation, have eaten out their hearts with longing for their lost world, or, like the Saint of Avila, in mystic ecstasy have striven to be one with the celestial spouse. All this may well have been, but the dim sisterhood has left no record of its passage upon earth, except the name Inch Cailleach, beautiful in its liquid likeness to the sound of the murmuring waves, and the wind sighing in the brackens and the bents.”
― R.B. Cunninghame Graham, The Complete Scottish Sketches of R.B. Cunninghame Graham: 'A Careless Enchantment'

“The matter slipped my memory, under the pressure of dressing and undressing, taking railway tickets, missing trains, attending churches, theatres, reading speeches and share lists, talking of art and science with others to the full as ignorant of both as myself, and in the exercise of the futilities during the course of which we find one day our hair is grey, our teeth decaying, and death near at hand.”
― R.B. Cunninghame Graham, The Complete Scottish Sketches of R.B. Cunninghame Graham: 'A Careless Enchantment'