Best 12 quotes of Edwin Muir on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I noticed that as I drove through the defaced and suffering patches of country which still persist between Glasgow and Hamilton and Airdrie and Motherwell, no scents from hedges and fields streamed into the open car. ...it was as if in this region nature no longer breathed, or gave out at most the chill dank mineral breath of coal and iron. The air itself had a synthetic taste, the taste of a food substitute, and seemed to be merely an up-to-date by-product of local industry. The forlorn villages looked like dismembered bits of towns brutally hacked off, and with the raw edges left nakedly exposed. The towns themselves, on the other hand, were like villages on a nightmare scale, which after endless building had never managed to produce what looked like a street, and had no centre of any kind. One could not say that these places were flying asunder, for there was no sign of anything holding them together. They were merely a great number of houses jumbled together in a wilderness of grime, coal-dust and brick, under a blackish-grey synthetic sky.

The Hotel dining-room, like most of the others I was to find in the Highlands, had its walls covered with pictures of all sorts of wild game, living or in the various postures of death that are produced by sport. Between these pictures the walls were alert with the stuffed heads of deer, furnished with antlers of every degree of magnificence. A friend of mine has a theory that these pictures of dying birds and wounded beasts are intended to whet the diner's appetite, and perhaps they did in the more lusty age of Victoria; but I found they had the opposite effect on me, and had to keep my eyes from straying too often to them. In one particular hotel this idea was carried out with such thoroughness that the walls of its dining room looked like a shambles, they presented such an overwhelming array of bleeding birds, beasts and fishes. To find these abominations on the walls of Highland hotels, among a people of such delicacy in other things, is peculiarly revolting, and rubs in with superfluous force that this is a land whose main contemporary industry is the shooting down of wild creatures; not production of any kind but wholesale destruction. This state of things is not the fault of the Highlanders, but of the people who have bought their country and come to it chiefly to kill various forms of life.

The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.