Alastair Reid (poet)

"... St Andrews, that placid centre of non-learning."

"The Borders loom in my mind as a small archipelago of stony towns in a placid sea of grass, woods and furrows, small, bristling islands in a state of armed truce with one another, with their village satellites, their lumbering bus-ferries, their pugnacious localisms."

"I can remember coming bursting in from just having glimpsed eternity in a grain of sand and being told, curtly: 'Your tea's cold.' It may be that tea is the reality and glimpses of eternity only a temporary foolishness. If I ever thought so, it might be possible to give up resisting and to belong."

"It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet, when larks rose on long thin strings of singing and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels."