We never find what we set out hearts on. We ought to be glad of that.

The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.

In Scotland, when people congregate, they tend to argue and discuss and reason; in Orkney, they tell stories.

Without the story - in which everyone living, unborn and dead, participates - men are no more than bits of paper blown on the cold wind.

As soon as the seal was clear of the water, it reared up and its skin slipped down to the sand. What had been a seal was a white-skinned boy

Hills tell old stories. Cliffs are poets with harps.

Old wisdom out of the cluster of gathering shadows.

The Orkney imagination is haunted by time.

We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds.

Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!

If you look for problems, you will find problems; if you look for solutions, you will find solutions.

I think I was brought up with games and I don't think that they're just Pac-Man or Space Invaders. I think we've moved on, I think that there are stories being told and worlds being explored.

All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.

Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs.

No action can be performed successfully without a clear result in view.

I can hear you and I can watch your mouth move, and then I put together the sounds and the visual image and I can understand the words as I integrate the two signals.

Who will ever give counsel, if the counsel be judged by the event, and if it be not found wise, shall therefore be thought wicked?

She nods. You're good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.