Tomas Transtromer Quotes

#1. 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.

Tomas Transtromer

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

Tomas Transtromer

#3. 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.

Tomas Transtromer

#4. I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn't write
swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship
and drifted away at last through the night sky.

Tomas Transtromer

#5. Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark. A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets in blindness and anxiety on the way towards a miracle, while I invisibly remain standing.

Tomas Transtromer

#6. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives.

Tomas Transtromer

#7. The calendar is full but the future is blank.

Tomas Transtromer

#8. Every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as a blueprint of a storm,

Tomas Transtromer

#9. You live well.
The slum must be inside you.

Tomas Transtromer

#10. It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

Tomas Transtromer

#11. Every person is a half-opened door
leading to a room for everyone.

Tomas Transtromer

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

Tomas Transtromer

#13. The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: 'I am not empty, I am open'.

Tomas Transtromer

#14. 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.

Tomas Transtromer

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

Tomas Transtromer

#16. 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.

Tomas Transtromer

#17. 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.

Tomas Transtromer

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

Tomas Transtromer

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

Tomas Transtromer

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

Tomas Transtromer

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

Tomas Transtromer

#22. 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.

Tomas Transtromer

#23. It's always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real.

Tomas Transtromer

#24. The storm puts its lips to the house and blows to make a sound.

Tomas Transtromer

#25. A ship's engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew's magnifying glass. Without really knowing, we divine; our life has a sister ship, following quietly another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands.

Tomas Transtromer

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

Tomas Transtromer