Quotes About Eliot

When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.

So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.

Justice is like the kingdom of God--it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.

The name of the Treasury agent Eliot Ness meant little then, but it was he who ordered wiretaps on the house as well as on Ralph's suite at the Western Hotel (as the Hawthorne had recently been renamed).

Lewes and Eliot between them, someone has said, a little pretentiously but not wrongly, defined the liberalism of the oikos, the Greek word for home, whereas Trollope's is the liberalism of the polis, the city. Lewes and Eliot were more prescient of our own preoccupations: reform had to pass through the living room before it could move to Parliament.

I remember being struck that, as with the Old Possum poems, Eliot had written "Billy McCaw" with a defined verse and chorus almost as if he were writing lyrics. Here Eliot betrays that he was American. I don't believe any British poet wrote at the time like this. Years later Valerie told me that Eliot invariably had a hit tune of the time in his head when he wrote what she called his "off-duty" poems.

The same impulse to unman a social or cultural threat gambols across the exchange with Eliot. "Why you haven't been offered the lead in some sexy movies I can only attribute to the stupidity of casting directors," writes the movie star to the dour literary man.

Or again, exegesis of The Waste Land often reads remarkably like the psychoanalytic interpretation of a dream, yet we know that Eliot's methods were prepared for him not by Freud but by other poets.

Eliot knew the Heights well enough to have spent as little time there as possible while growing up. The town's small downtown had some class, especially the Hotel Victoria, designed by Louis Sullivan, but it was a thin facade. Three blocks in any direction and you felt like you might be set upon by wild dogs.

Most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mindmatter question; they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces. This rejection of dualism and the corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art.

never could see what was so disgraceful about 'stiffening in a rented house,' as Eliot wrote. Do you croak better on your own property?

You need to let the spirits have their way Shan

I protest against any absolute conclusion.

He has got no good red blood in his body, said Sir James.

the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. Not

Still, I repeat, there was a general impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any general practitioner in Middlemarch. And

For the egoism which enter into our theories does not effect their sincerity, rather the more our egoism is satisfied the more robust is our belief

if it were possible for a healthy female mind even to simulate

I had never understood what Eliot meant by the curious phrase 'objective correlative' until the scene in Gatsby where the almost comically sinister Meyer Wolfsheim, who has just been introduced, displays his cuff links and explain that they are 'the finest specimens of human molars.' Get it? Got it. That's what Eliot meant (109).

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

the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

For Browning, Mr. Pound has always professed strong admiration (see Mesmerism in Personae); there are traces of him in Cino and Famam Librosque Cano, in the same volume. But it is more profitable to comment upon the variety of metres and the original use of language. Ezra Pound

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

It's the first novel [ Satyricon by Petronius] in which the size of a male character's genitals is noted, a detail you hardly ever get in George Eliot's novels.