The Tunnel Quotes

“So Mr Brain opened his mouth to let a moonbeam into his head.”
― Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems

“Everything is made of time, and we go out in waves, accumulating around ourselves in halos of dust, the borders bleeding into each other; the tearing and merging of clouds.”
― Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems

“One feels that things are about to change. I have felt this all my life. It is a readiness that robs every act of meaning, making every situation obsolete, putting the present into the past.”
― Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems

“This is the house of the closet-man. There are no rooms, just hallways and closets.
Things happen in rooms. He does not like things to happen.”
― Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems

“The living room is overgrown with grass. It has come up around the furniture. It stretches through the dining room, past the swinging door into the kitchen. It extends for miles and miles into the walls...
There's treasure in the grass, things dropped or put there; a stick of rust that was once a penknife, a grave marker...All hidden in the grass at the scalp of the meadow.
In a cellar under the grass an old man sits in a rocking chair, rocking to and fro. In his arms he holds an infant, the infant body of himself. And he rocks to and fro under the grass in the dark.”
― Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems

“A toy-maker made a toy wife and a toy child. He made a toy house and some toy years.”
― Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems

“On the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world, where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.”
― Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems

“Goddamn these sentiences, roared the tree with birds shrieking in its branches.”
― Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems

“What shall I do? screamed his son.
Sit until time embraces you into the bosom of its velvet quiet, cried the father.
Like this? cried his son as his son became dust.”
― Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems

“A lighted window floats through the night like a piece of paper in the wind.
I want to see into it. I want to climb through into its lighted room.
As I reach for it it slips through the trees. As I chase it it rolls and tumbles into the air and skitters on through the night...”
― Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems