Edwin Muir Quotations

There is a road that turning always Cuts off the country of Again. Archers stand there on every side And as it runstime's deer is slain, And lies where it has lain.

Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.

And without fear the lawless roads Ran wrong through all the land.

Packed in my skin from head to toe is one I know and do not know.

See him, the gentle Bible beast, / With lacquered hoofs and curling mane, / His wondering journey from the East / Half done, between the rock and plain.

The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.

The life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man.

I have observed in foolish awe The dateless mid-days of the law And seen indifferent justice done By everyone on everyone.

Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep, Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow, And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

We meet ourselves at every turn In the long country of the past.

The ancestral deed is thought and done, And in a million Edens fall A million Adams drowned in darkness, For small is great and great is small, And a blind seed all.

Kindness and courage can repair time's faults, And serving him breeds patience and courtesy In us, light sojourners and passing subjects.

There is a road that turning always / Cuts off the country of Again. / Archers stand there on every side / And as it runs Time's deer is slain, / And lies where it has lain.

We have seen / Good men made evil wrangling with the evil, / Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds. / Our peace betrayed us; we betrayed our peace. / Look at it well. This was the good town once.

And without fear the lawless roadsRan wrong through all the land.

Oh these deceits are strong almost as life, / Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth, / And woke far on. I did not know the place.