The Great Enigma Quotes

“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 Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

“Every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as a blueprint of a storm,”
― Tomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

“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 . . .”
― Tomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

“Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.”
― Tomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

“I must be alone ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening. – Without a programme.”
― Tomas Tranströmer, New Collected Poems

“Espresso The black coffee they serve out of doors among tables and chairs gaudy as insects. Precious distillations filled with the same strength as Yes and No. It’s carried out from the gloomy kitchen and looks into the sun without blinking. In the daylight a dot of beneficent black that quickly flows into a pale customer. It’s like the drops of black profoundness sometimes gathered up by the soul, giving a salutary push: Go! Inspiration to open your eyes.”
― Tomas Tranströmer, New Collected Poems

“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.”
― Tomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

“This woman keeps buying things to toss in the hungry mouth of the vacuum sneaking up behind her.”
― Tomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

“There is Peace in the Surging Prow"

On a winter morning you feel how this earth
plunges ahead. Against the house walls
an air current smacks
out of hiding.

Surrounded by movement: the tent of calm.
And the secret helm in the migrating flock.
Out of the winter gloom
a tremolo rises

from hidden instruments. It is like standing
under summer’s high lime tree with the din
of ten thousand
insect wings above your head.”
― Tomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

“And the shadow gathers and becomes a tidal wave a tidal wave with riding sea gulls darkened. And the port-side heart sizzles in a breaker. Death and renewal when the wave arrives. The gathering of white birds grew: gulls dressed in canvas from the sails of foundered ships but stained by vapors from forbidden shores. The herring gull: a harpoon with a velvet back. In closeup like a snowed-in hull with hidden pulses glittering in rhythm. His flier’s nerves in balance. He soars. Footless hanging in the wind he dreams his hunter’s dream with his beak’s sharp shot.”
― Tomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems