Edwin Muir Quotes

Edwin Muir writes wistful, lyrical verses about love, time and existence that linger in the mind.

16 quotes

  1. The world's great day is growing late, Yet strange these fields that we have planted So long with crops of love and hate.

  2. Long time he lay upon the sunny hill, To his father's house below securely bound.

  3. They do not live in the world, Are not in time and space. From birth to death hurled No word do they have, not one To plant a foot upon, Were never in any place.

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

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

  6. 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.

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

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

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

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

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

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

  14. 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.

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

  16. “ Light and praise, Love and atonement, harmony and peace. Touch me, assail me, break and make my heart.”