Hugh MacDiarmid Quotes

Scotland small? Our multiform, infinite Scotland small?

My job, as I see it, has never been to lay a tit’s egg, but to erupt like a volcano emitting not only flame but a lot of rubbish.

So this is what our lives have been given to find, A language that can serve our purposes, A marvellous lucidity, a quality of fiery aery light, Flowing like clear water, flying like a bird Burning like a sunlit landscape.

We do not like the confiding, the intimate, the ingratiating, the hail-fellow-well-met, but prefer the unapproachable, the hard-bitten, the recalcitrant, the sinister, the malignant, the saturnine, the cross-grained and the cankered, and the howling wilderness to the amenities of civilization, the irascible to the affable, the prickly to the smooth. We have no damned fellow-feeling at all.

The rose of all the world is not for me. I want for my part Only the little white rose of Scotland That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.

We must reconcile ourselves to the stones, Not the stones to us.