I had long ago learned, sometimes to my sorrow, that Scottish piety is accompanied by a complete foreknowledge of sin. That's what we mean by original sin — we don't have to do it to know about it.

But first of all he is a woodsman, and you aren't a woodsman unless you have such a feeling for topography that you can look at the earth and see what it would look like without any woods or covering on it. It's something like the gift all men wish for when they or young — or old — of being able to look through a woman's clothes and see her body, possibly even a little of her character.

I knew that, when needed, mountains would move for me.