Quotes from T.S. Eliot

Politic, cautious, and meticulous; full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse

I have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men leaning out of windows

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.

Leš što si ga lane zakopao u bašti Pušta li ve? izdanke? Ho?e li procvetati ove godine, Il' mu je nenadna stud leju uništila?

We wait, we wait, And the saints and martyrs wait, for those who shall be martyrs and saints. Destiny waits in the hand of God, shaping the still unshapen: I have seen these things in a shaft of sunlight. Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen Who do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing, Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time.

the communication/of the dead is tongued with fire beyond/the language of the living--The Little Gidding

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih

Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray: Pray for those who chose and oppose

Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations? Are we all in fact unloving and unlovable? Then one is alone, and if one is alone Then lover and beloved are equally unreal And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.

Who is the third who walks always beside you? 360 When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman —But who is that on the other side of you?

If the reader says the state of affairs which I wish to bring about is right, or is just, or is inevitable and if this must lead into further deterioration, then I will have no quarrel with it. I might even, in some circumstances, feel obliged to support him.

Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress?

the evening lay out against the sky Like a patient, etherised on a table

It is just the literature that we read for 'amusement' or 'purely for pleasure' that may have the greatest, least suspected, earliest influence on us.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

mixing Memory and desire

Survival is your strength not your shame.

The young feel tired at the end of an action— The old, at the beginning.

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then.

Hay épocas en que uno siente que ha caído a pedazos y a la vez se ve a sí mismo en mitad de la carretera estudiando las piezas sueltas, preguntándose si será capaz de montarlas otra vez y qué especie de artefaco saldrá.

And I hope we can contrive his future happiness. Do not discuss his absence. Please behave only As if nothing had happened in the last eight years.