Edwin Muir Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.

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

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

Edwin Muir
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.

Edwin Muir
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.

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

Edwin Muir
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.

Edwin Muir
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry.

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

Edwin Muir
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.

Edwin Muir
I take my journey back to seek my kindred,
Old founts dried up whose rivers run far on Through you and me.

Edwin Muir
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.

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

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

Edwin Muir
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.

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

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

Edwin Muir
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads, But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts. Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Edwin Muir
The killing beast that cannot kill Swells and swells in his fury till You'd almost think it was despair.

Edwin Muir