OH, to say something worthwhile. ’Tis the stuff that dreams are made on.
I witter thus in the wake of news that American author Diana Gabaldon has come first in a vote for top quote in Scotia Minor.
The writer of a romantic histories series involving a Jacobite warrior and a Second World War nurse – it is, literally, a long story – had one of her characters say, and I quote: “I am your master … and you’re mine. Seems I canna possess your soul without losing my own.”
That sounds a bit racy to me, though quite clever and surely loved by the estimable Ms Gabaldon’s many fans. If you’re unfamiliar with the Outlander books, you may nevertheless have heard about the stooshie over the TV series.
Set in Scotland, and even filmed here, it was thought “too intense” to be broadcast on British mainstream television, even though it was shown everywhere else. Ostensibly, the intensity referred to the violence and sex but, since we’re exposed to bizarrely sadistic Nordic Noir with nary a murmur, that sounds a little anorexic.
Then there was the revelation, through emails publicised by Wikileaks earlier this year, that TV executives met Prime Minister David Cameron to discuss the series. This doesn’t normally happen. Nobody sat down with Margaret Thatcher and asked: “So, what do you think of Minder then?”
Given the febrile atmosphere of the independence referendum campaign at the time, it’s thought by some that the series was discouraged, so to say, because it would feed Scotch patriotism. Who knows? At any rate, I’ve just had an idea for a 10-part trilogy involving a Jacobite warrior and and an Eton-educated prime minister.
Alas, as we are currently experiencing, I witter on too much to write 10 novels. I wish I’d written Sunset Song, which literary experts in Scotland usually refer to as Top Book Ever, and which supplied the second most popular quote in the online poll organised by the Scottish Book Trust.
To wit: “You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day and the next you’d waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you’d cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies.”
Aye. Crivvens, I was nearly welling up just typing that. I don’t mind that Lewis Grassic Gibbon came second in the poll. As we showed last year, we are a nation of number twos. Besides, other Scots plus JK Rowling, who defeated Scotland in the aforementioned referendum, appear in the top 10. And anyway, the Gabaldon clearly loves Scotia the Not Very Brave, and I’m not one to look a gift horse in the gub.
On a less literary note, the most inspiring quotes I collect these days are from commenters on the internet, who are full of pith. Take this after a heart-rending story, with photo, about Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in Britain: “Her wallpaper doesn’t match.” Or this brusque and authoritative assessment under a worthy story about Prince Charles touring a troubled world: “The man is a tool.”
The first quote that follows here is profound, but the second person nails it.
“Immortals are human beings that have reached enlightenment and so have broken free of the cycles of reincarnation but chose to help others to attain this level. Their work is based on love for us.”
“U don’t know jack s***, mate.”
To take another inferior sphere of debate, journalism thrives on good quotes, and top people like to think they’re giving them. I shouldn’t really tell you this because it’s embarrassing but, once, I was interviewing a top person (might as well reveal it was a banker so that you’ll side with me) when he stopped and said: “Can you read me back my quotes?” And, other than doodles, all I’d written in my notebook was: “What is this eejit on about?”
No luck there. But, as with the vast majority of us, this feeble financier would go through life without saying one quotable thing. Oh, to be a Gibbon or a Gabaldon, conveying truths or beauty in condensed packages that stand the test of time.
Rudyard Kipling once wrote of someone who “wrapped himself in quotations — as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors”. But don’t quote him on that.
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