The Quarry Wood Quotes

“It’s a grand thing, to get leave to live”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“Am I such a slave as that? Dependent on a man to complete me! I thought I couldn't be anything without him- I can be my own creator!”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“To Martha it seemed that she stood outside life. The world went by her, colourless shapes on a flat pale background. Nothing had solidity or warmth. She felt numb, as though she could never be passionately alive again.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“Gales brandished the half-denuded boughs and whirled the leaves in madcap companies about the roads. The whole world sounded. A roaring and a rustle and a creak was everywhere; and dust and dead leaves eddied in the gateways.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“Ach!" cried Emmeline impatiently, "you had aye a saft side to Madge. Onybody wi' their twa een in their heid cud a' seen the road she was like to tak. Wi' her palaverin' an' her pooderin' an' her this an' that. She had a' her orders, had Madge. An' a stink o scent 'at wad knock ye doon. Foozlin' her face wi' pooders. Eneuch to pit faces ooten fashion. I wadna be seen ga'in' the length o' masel wi' a face like yon. A wadna ging the midden sic a sicht.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“But oftner the nights were clear, marvellously lit. Darkness was a pale lustrous gloom. Sometimes the north was silver clear, so luminous that through the filigree of leaf and sapling its glow pierced burning, as though the light were a patterned loveliness standing out against the background of the trees. Later the glow dulled and the trees became the pattern against the background of the light. The hushed world took her in. Tranqil, surrendered, she became one with the vast quiet night. A puddock sprawled noiselessly towards her, a bat swooped, tracing gigantic patterns upon the sky, a corncrake scraighed, on and on through the night, monotonous and forgotten as one forgets the monotony of the sea's roar; and when the soft wind was in the south-west, the sound of the river, running among its stony rapids below the ferry, floated up and over her like a tide. She fell asleep to its running and wakened to listen for it; and heard it as one hears the breathing of another.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“But at the end of February, out of a cold black north a dozen meandering snowflakes fell. They drifted about the air like thrums - blown from the raw edges of the coming storm. Next morning, colour had gone from the world. Shapes, sounds, the energies and acuteness of life, were muffled in the dull white that covered both earth and sky. No sun came through. The weeks dragged on with no lifting of the pallor. The snow melted a little and froze again with smears of dirt marbelling its surfaces. To the northward of the dykes it was lumped in obstinate seams, at the cottage doors trodden and caked, matted with refuse, straws and stones and clots of dung carried in about on clorted boots. The ploughs lay idle, gaunt, like half-sunk among the furrows.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“The grey Crown, that had soared through so many generations above the surge and excitement of youth, had told her that wisdom is patient and waits for its people. The greed went out of her as she looked up morning after morning at its serenity. It was like a great rock amid the changing tides of men's opinions. Knowledge alters - wisom is stable. It told her time and again that there is no need for haste. In the long Library, too, with the coloured light filtering through it's great window, and its dim recesses among the laden shelves - where thought, the enquiring experiencing spirit, the essence of man's long tussle with his destiny, was captured and preserved: a dessicated powder, dusted across inumerable leaves, and set free, volatile, live spirit again at the touch of a living mind - she learned to be quiet.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“Martha said it over and over to herself: "Scotland is bounded on the south by England, on the east by the rising sun, on the north by the Arory-bory-Alice, and on the west by Eternity."

...She repeated the boundaries of Scotland with the same satisfaction as she repeated the rivers of Spain. Up to her University days she carried the conviction that there was something about Scotland in the Bible.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood

“Martha Ironside was nine years old when she kicked her great-aunt Josephine. At nineteen she loved the old lady, idly perhaps, in her natural humour, as she loved the sky and space. At twenty-four, when Miss Josephine Leggatt died, aged seventy-nine and reluctant, Martha knew that it she who had taught her wisdom; thereby proving - she reflected - that man does not learn from books alone; because Martha had kicked Aunt Josephine (at the age of nine) for taking her from her books.”
― Nan Shepherd, The Quarry Wood