Glens Quotes

“I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,And not in paths of high morality,And not among the half-distinguished faces,The clouded forms of long-past history.I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:It vexes me to choose another guide:Where the grey flocks in ferny glens are feeding;Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.”

“Writing a novel is a bit like being Daniel Boone. An author stands atop a ridge in a mountain range and can generally see a number of peaks in the distance. What lies between those peaks—the dales and glens, rivers, forests, and other features that distinguish one mountain landscape from another... is where the artistry and intrigue of the writing process lives. As the writer sets out into the story, leaving behind those high points—the beginning, a twist here and there, the climax, and, if perhaps a bit indistinct for the distance to cover, the end—entering the vale below, all manner of things can happen the writer never intended or expected at the onset.”

“The long-term integrity of the empire would not be assured by warm words alone. Britain"s own position in the empire had changed. Once, the country been the engine room of empire, the productive heart of the beast. But with Britain becoming more like a boardroom, investing money, taking decisions, but essentially living off the labor of others, and off the earnings of the past? At some point in the future, might even this role wither away, and might Britain become little more than a repository of British tradition, a common idealized land into which Britons abroad – in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa – could retreat, a collective memory of Greenfields and swooping glens?”