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1 " The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel. "
― Edwin Muir
2 " 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. "
― Edwin Muir , Scottish Journey
3 " 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. "
4 " Light and praise,Love and atonement, harmony and peace.Touch me, assail me, break and make my heart. "
5 " Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth, Dazed with the tall and echoing passages, The swift recoils, so many I almost feared I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner, Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal After the straw ceased rustling and the bull Lay dead upon the straw and I remained… I could not live if this were not illusion. It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another. For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle, While down below the little ships sailed by… That was the real world; I have touched it once, And now shall know it always. But the lie, The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads That run and run and never reach an end, Embowered in error – I’d be prisoned there But that my soul has birdwings to fly free. 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. "
6 " Yours, my love, is the right human face. "
7 " I think that if we examine our lives, we will find that most good has come to us from the few loyalties, and a few discoveries made many generations before we were born, which must always be made anew. These too may sometimes appear to come by chance, but in the infinite web of things and events chance must be something different from what we think it to be. To comprehend that is not given to us, and to think of it is to recognize a mystery, and to acknowledge the necessity of faith. As I look back on the part of the mystery which is my own life, my own fable, what I am most ware of is that we receive more than we can ever give; we receive it from the past, on which we draw with every breath .... "
― Edwin Muir , An Autobiography
