Les Murray > Quotes

“Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment. / For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike / down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment. / For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb / before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond / your own intelligence.”
― Les Murray, New Selected Poems

“When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.”
― Les Murray, Fredy Neptune

“The horror of Time is, people don’t snap out of it.”
― Les Murray

“How deep is the weatherfront of time
that advances, roaring and calm
unendingly between was and will be?
A millisecond? A few hours? All secular life
worldwide, all consequences of past life
travel in it.
(from 'The Welter')”
― Les Murray, The Biplane Houses

“THE FUTURE There is nothing about it. Much science fiction is set there but is not about it. Prophecy is not about it. It sways no yarrow stalks. And crystal is a mirror. Even the man we nailed on a tree for a lookout said little about it; he told us evil would come. We”
― Les Murray, The Best 100 Poems of Les Murray