Quotes About T.S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot was wrong about April being the cruelest month: it's January.

In real life, having your poetry criticized by T.S. Eliot could cause you to doubt your poetic gifts. But imagining it in a dream has the opposite effect. That dream could become the source for a story.

Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three—and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?

Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.

The aim of yoga is to eliminate the control that material nature exerts over the human spirit, to rediscover through introspective practice what the poet T.S. Eliot called "the still point of the turning world."

I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat.

Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow. This is the way the world ends. from The Hollow Man

And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear

Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

And right action is freedom from past and future also. For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. The Dry Salvages

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

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.

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised As the mind deserts the body it has used. I should find Some way incomparably light and deft, Some way we both should understand, Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

A restless shivering painted shadow In life, she is less than a shadow in death.

Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse

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

I have all of the rightminded feeling about John That you consider appropriate. Only, that's not the language That I choose to be talking. I will not talk yours.

I think: it's strange how the old Can drop off to sleep in the middle of calamity Like children, or like hardened campaigners

I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. — T.S. Eliot, from "Preludes," Prufrock and Other Observations . (Forgotten Books September 27, 2015) Originally published 1917.

I suspect, in fact, that a good deal of the value of an interpretation is -- that it should be my own interpretation.

The backward look behind the assurance Of recorded history, the backward half-look Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

You have now learned to see That cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind.