Tomas Transtromer Quotes

In the middle of life, death comes to take your measurements. The visit is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit is being sewn on the sly.

Human beings sleep:
some can sleep peacefully, others have tense faces
as though in hard training for eternity.
They don't dare to let go even in sleep.
They wait like lowered gates while the mystery rolls past.

I am carried in my shadow like a violin in its black case

A person shows himself for an instant as in a photograph but clearer and in the background something which is bigger than his shadow.

Weary of all who come with words, words but no language,
I make my way to the snow-covered island.

The untamed has no words.
The unwritten pages spread out on every side!

I come upon the tracks of deer in the snow.
Language but no words.

Midwinter"

A blue sheen
radiates from my clothes.
Midwinter.
Jangling tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a soundless world
there is a crack
where dead people
are smuggled across the border.

I walk slowly into myself, through a forest of empty suits of armor.

I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings.

You live well.
The slum must be inside you.

But every person has their own encyclopedia written, which grows out from each soul, composed from birth onward, hundreds of thousands of pages pressing into each other and yet there's air between them! Like trembling leaves in a forest. A book of contradictions. What's in there is revised by the moment; the images touch themselves up, the words flicker. A wave washes through the entire text, followed by the next wave, and the next . . .

I am still the place where creation does some work on itself.

We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is me. The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones.

In the middle of life it happens that death comes
and takes your measurements. This visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit is
sewn in the silence.

Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.

The language marches in step with the executioners.
Therefore we must get a new language.

The gentle downward slope gets steeper
and imperceptibly becomes an abyss.

Death stoops over me.
I'm a problem in chess. He
has the solution.

Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer's hooves in the snow.
Language, but no words.

No one decides where I go, least of all myself, though each step is where it must be.

A darker storm stands over the world. It puts its mouth to our soul and blows to get a tone. We are afraid the storm will blow us empty.