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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.