Quotes from book
Castle Gay

Name: Castle Gay
Author: John Buchan

Castle Gay is a 1930 novel by the Scottish author John Buchan. It is the second of his three Dickson McCunn novels and is set in the Scottish district of Carrick, Galloway some six years after the events described in Huntingtower.

“[On the newspapers of the Craw Press:] Their politics are an opiate to prevent folk thinking.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 3

“Mrs. Brisbane-Brown was a relic, but only the unthinking would have called her a snob. For snobbishness implies some sense of insecurity, and she was perfectly secure.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 6

“He knew nothing accurately about any subject in the world, but he could clothe his ignorance in pontifical garments and give his confusion the accents of authority. He had a remarkable flair for discerning and elaborating the tiny quantum of popular knowledge on any matter.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 2

“He realised how oddly detached he was. […] He enjoyed every moment, but he knew that his enjoyment came largely from standing a little apart. He was not a cynic, for there was no sourness in him. He had a kindliness towards most things, and a large charity. But he did not take sides. He had not accepted any mood, or creed, or groove of his own. Vix ea nostra voco [I scarcely call these things our own] was his motto. He was only a seeker […] occupied in finding out what was in his soul.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 20

“The Scottish Communist is a much misunderstood person. When he is a true Caledonian, and not a Pole or an Irishman, he is simply the lineal descendant of the old Radical. The Scottish Radical was a man who held a set of inviolable principles on which he was entirely unable to compromise. It did not matter what the principles were; the point was that they were like the laws of Sinai, which could not be added to or subtracted from. When the Liberal party began to compromise, he joined Labour; when Labour began to compromise, by a natural transition he became a Communist. Temperamentally he has not changed. He is simply the stuff which in the seventeenth century made the unyielding Covenanter, and in the eighteenth the inflexible Jacobite. He is honesty incarnate, but his mind lacks flexibility.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 14

“[W]ithout humour you cannot run a sweetie-shop, let alone a nation.”

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 19

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