James Robertson > Quotes

“There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.”
― James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack

“[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it.

Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“I stood staring to heaven and nothing came from there, no mercy or redemption. Whatever had come had come already and it was not sent by God. I stood, arms outstretched and empty, like a man praying but I was not praying, I was crying, because it had come to this and I had come to this place, and they were not with me... they were gone for ever.”
― James Robertson, The Professor of Truth

“They were ashamed of it, or at least they didn’t think we should have it. The future was English. My grandad is dead no, but last year I went to my granny and said to her, in Gaelic, why did you hide it from us? And when she realised how much I could speak she started crying. She said they’d thought it was for the best. Gaelic would handicap us. But now I speak nothing but Gaelic to her and she loves it. I’m learning loads from her. I’m not fluent yet, but I’m getting close.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Walking through a deserted city in the hours before dawn is sobering way beyond the undoing of the effects of alcohol. Every thing is familiar, and everything is strange. It's as if you are the only survivor of some mysterious calamity which has emptied the place of its population, and yet you know that behind the shuttered and curtained windows people lie sleeping in their tens of thousands, and all their joys and disasters lie sleeping too. It makes you think of your own life, usually suspended at that hour, and how you are passing through it as if in a dream. Reality seems very unreal.”
― James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack

“But I do like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that's always just below the surface. And I like the way you deal with religion. One century you're up to your lugs in it, the next you're trading the whole apparatus in for Sunday superstores. Praise the Lord and thrash the bairns. Ask and ye shall have the door shut in your face. Blessed are they that shop on the Sabbath, for they shall get the best bargains. Oh yes, this is a very fine country.”
― James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack

“If you think yourself into the past, that's where you'll end up - and faster than you expect.”
― James Robertson, To Be Continued...

“She was convinced the country was about to succumb to revolutionary socialism. Her own circumstances encouraged this belief: just on the edge of the really rich country set, she shared their views and opinions but lacked the financial and architechtural insulation from real or imagined political troubles. She found crushed larger cans and cigarette packets in her front garden and interpreted these as menacing signals from the Perthshire proletariat. Every flicker and dim of electric light was a portent of class war.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“And if it taks tanks and bullets and mass arrests to convince the people what’s good for them, can it be aw that good for them?”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“What fortunate is that! To live in this beautiful country and be old and healthy and be with someone you love and respect every minute of the day, every day of the week. What fortune is that!”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“It’s a terrible admission to make,’ Jean says, ‘but no. Between what Henry left me and what came to me when my parents passed on, I’ve always had enough. I’ve been lucky, I know. Some people would say I’ve had a wasted life, achieved nothing. But my good fortune gave me some space to think, and maybe that meant I was able to give other people space to think. Maybe I’ve been a facilitator. Ghastly word. But anyway, not altogether a wasted life.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“Returning to Jamaica, he had the sense of re-entering a place much less likely to alter in the coming years. Year in, year out, the cane fields produced their riches, the gangs swung their way through them, slaves were brought, seasoned, used up, replaced. Planters would go on making improvements to their great houses, to methods of production, and yes, to the conditions in which their slaves lived and worked, because it was in their interest to do so. But fundamentally the structure of life and of society did not change.”
― James Robertson, Joseph Knight

“Literature that grows from a particular place or culture contains a set of identifying markers, and one of its functions is to articulate - in voices we recognise as our own - hope and complaint, gratitude and intent, praise and criticism; to speak of what unites us and what divides us, of love and loss, of truth and principle.”
― James Robertson, The Scottish Parliament at Twenty

“All stories are lies, Mike. The secret is to work out how big the light is. That’s why we keep believing in a thing called truth. It doesn’t exist but we can’t help looking for it. It’s one of the most endearing of human failings.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“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

“You’d escaped because everybody else was hell-bent on wanting everything and you saw it wasn’t going to work…..
It wasn’t the age of small nations as you thought, it was the age of money and waste and garbage and pollution and destruction and it was all going to get worse,….”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“The things that have been put in place in the last five years – National Insurance, pensions, the Health Service – these were changes for the good, they made ordinary people’s lives better, safer, happier and longer. Any government that tried to undo them, Don believed, would risk the wrath of the people.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“This was Scotland in 1950: coast to coast Jock Tamson's bairns stood or sat, lugs cocked to the wireless for news from home and abroad, from Borlanslogie, from Korea, or tuned in for The McFlannels on a Saturday night, or It's All Yours on a Monday with young Jimmy Logan doing the daft laddie Sammy Dreep, sluttering 'Sausages is the boys!' This was Scotland in 1950: land of 250 pits and 80,000 colliers, 100,000 farmworkers and four universities: land of Singer sewing machines in Clydebank, the Saxone Shoe Company in Kilmarnock, Cox Brothers jute mills in Dundee and the North British Locomotive Company in Springburn, every town and city and every part of every city with it own industries and hard-won skills... This was the land of Leyland Tiger buses from Thurso to Dalbeattie, and double-deckers crowding the city trams towards oblivion, or grandiose department stores and miserable slums, tearooms and single-ends, savage sectarianism and gloomy gentility, no-quarter football and stultifying Sundays.”
― James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still

“I don’t believe in anything except this one thing: where you are. Everybody has a place: that’s all I believe in. Whether you call it home or not, whether it is where you end up or where you started or somewhere in between, everybody has a place. Like where animals go to hide, to sleep, to die (292).”
― James Robertson, News of the Dead

“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

“People think we didn't have theatres in Scotland for centuries because the Church suppressed them. Well, perhaps. But you could also argue that we had theatres in every town and village in the land: they were called kirks, and every week folk packed in to see a one-man show about life, death and the universe.”
― James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack

“Scott found himself caught between a deep-seated loyalty to, and knowledge of, his country and an equally fundamental commitment to the Union with England. He sought to find a way for Scotland to accommodate its sense of identity with the economic and other benefits of being a partner in the greatest empire the world had yet seen, This was both a deliberate and a subconscious for a highly intelligent, complex, energetic and emotional man. To complete it successfully, the Scottish past had to b turned into a kind of serious playground, rich in possibility except for the possibility that it might inform the future in some disruptive way. Scott well knew, because of the way he himself was affected by it, that Scottish history had the potential to release grear energy: fascinated by it, he nevertheless felt a need to keep it, like a wild animal, behind a barrier of time. It was therefore fitting to his purpose that he should make the extraordinary claim to his tens of thousands of readers - in a book aimed particularly at the young - that nothing worth drawing to ther attention had occurred in Scotland in the pasr eighty years.”
― James Robertson, Finding Out the Rest: History and Scotland Now

“Scotland's passage from a mainly pastoral and agrarian society to a commercial and industrial one was brutal, rapid and relentless. In that transition, an entire peasant class, the cottars - perhaps as much as half of the rural population - was lost forever. They and tens of thousands of even poorer people were forced off the land across the Lowlands, Highlands and islands. They ended up in towns, cities and planned villages, they worked in mills, mines, quarries and iron works, or they emigrated to other parts of the world, or became soldiers, sailors, engineers, administrators and merchants in the service of the British Empire or the companies that thrived under its bellicose protection. Many prospered, many did not.”
― James Robertson, Irish Pages, Vol. 12, No. 2: Scotland