Scottish Quotations from Robert Louis Stevenson

For that is the mark of the Scot of all classes: that he
stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to
Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory
of his forbears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him
a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth
generation.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Duddingston, our big loch, is bearing; and I wish you
could have seen it this afternoon, covered with people, in
thin driving snow flurries, the big hill grim and white and
alpine overhead in the thick air, and the road up the
gorge, as it were into the heart of it, dotted black with
traffic. Moreover, I can skate a little bit; and what one can do is always pleasant to do. . . If you had seen the moon rising, a perfect sphere of smoky gold, in the dark air above the trees, and the white loch thick with skates, and the great hill, snow-sprinkled, overhead! It was a sight for a king. . . The little booths that hucksters set up round the edge were marked each one by its little lamp. There were some fires too; and the light, and the shadows of the people who stood round them to warm themselves, made a strange pattern all round on the snow-covered ice. A few people with lit torches began to travel up and down the ice, a lit circle travelling along with them over the snow... The walk home was very solemn and strange. Once, through a broken gorge, we had a glimpse of a little space of mackerel sky, moon-litten, on the other side of the hill; the broken ridges standing grey and spectral between; and the hilltop over all, snow-white, and strangely magnified in size.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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