Quotes from T.S. Eliot

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

Oed' und leer das Meer.

One must be so careful these days.

That corpse you planted last year in your garden, "Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

I have saved this afternoon for you.

Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away. Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling? Chill Fingers of yew be curled Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Ah, but 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. To pretend that they and we are the same Is a useful and convenient social convention Which must sometimes be broken.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

No one society and no one age of it realises all the values of civilisation. Not all of these values may be compatible with each other: what is at least as certain is that in realising some we lose the appreciation of others.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant — Among other things — or one way of putting the same thing: That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret, Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.

They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

And the blind eye creates The. empty forms between the ivory gates And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth This is the time of tension between dying and birth The place of solitude where three dreams cross Between blue rocks

I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

Well, the Theatre's certainly not what it was.

The conscience of a blackened street Impatient to assume the world. I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.