Quotes from Lewis Grassic Gibbon

So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. 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.

there were lovely things in the world, lovely that didn't endure, and the lovelier for that... Nothing endures.

So it was that she knew she liked him, loved him as they said in the soppy English books, you were shamed and a fool to say that in Scotland.

Folk said he had once been a scholar and written books and learned and learned till his brain fair softened and right off his head he'd gone and into the poorhouse asylum.

With them we may say there died a thing older than themselves, these were the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a song...

You can do without the day if you've a lamp quiet-lighted and kind in your heart.

you've hardly to look at a woman these days but she's in the family way.

To its original readers in 1932 Sunset Song was a book in itself; they could not know it was the first part of a trilogy. Many reacted with disgust to its frank treatment of sex and childbearing, its scorn for the rich and powerful, its sometimes strident anti-clericalism.