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In My Beginning Is My End. In Succession Houses Rise And Fall, Crumble, Are Extended, Are Removed, Destroyed, Restored, Or In Their Place Is An Open Field, Or A Factory, Or A By-pass. Old Stone To New Building, Old Timber To New Fires, Old Fires To Ashes, And Ashes To The Earth Which Is Already Flesh, Fur And Faeces, Bone Of Man And Beast, Cornstalk And Leaf.

-T. S. Eliot

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In My Beginning Is

T. S. Eliot

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In My Beginning Is My End. In Succession Houses Rise And Fall, Crumble, Are Extended, Are Removed, Destroyed, Restored, Or In Their Place Is An Open Field, Or A Factory, Or A By-pass. Old Stone To New Building, Old Timber To New Fires, Old Fires To Ashes, And Ashes To The Earth Which Is Already Flesh, Fur And Faeces, Bone Of Man And Beast, Cornstalk And Leaf.

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A Toothache, Or A Violent Passion, Is Not Necessarily Diminished By Our Knowledge Of Its Causes, Its Character, Its Importance Or Insignificance.

Our Difficulties Of The Moment Must Always Be Dealt With Somehow, But Our Permanent Difficulties Are Difficulties Of Every Moment.

We See The Light But See Not Whence It Comes. O Light Invisible, We Glorify Thee!

An Editor Should Tell The Author His Writing Is Better Than It Is. Not A Lot Better, A Little Better.

Talent Imitates, But Genius Steals.

I Had Seen Birth And Death But Had Thought They Were Different.

Do I Dare Disturb The Universe?

The Yellow Fog That Rubs Its Back Upon The Window-panes The Yellow Smoke That Rubs Its Muzzle On The Window-panes Licked Its Tongue Into The Corners Of The Evening Lingered Upon The Pools That Stand In Drains Let Fall Upon Its Back The Soot That Falls From Chimneys Slipped By The Terrace, Made A Sudden Leap And Seeing That It Was A Soft October Night Curled Once About The House, And Fell Asleep

April Is The Cruellest Month.

Because I Know That Time Is Always Time And Place Is Always And Only Place.

To Make An End Is To Make A Beginning.

Between The Vision And The Act Lies The Shadow.

So Far As We Are Human, What We Do Must Be Either Evil Or Good: So Far As We Do Evil Or Good, We Are Human: And It Is Better, In A Paradoxical Way, To Do Evil Than To Do Nothing: At Least We Exist.

I Can Connect Nothing With Nothing

I Think It Was Rather An Advantage Not Having Any Living Poets In England Or America In Whom One Took Any Particular Interest. I Don't Know What It Would Be Like But I Think It Would Be A Rather Troublesome Distraction To Have Such A Lot Of Dominating Presences, As You Call Them, About. Fortunately We Weren't Bothered By Each Other.

Whatever You Think, Be Sure It Is What You Think; Whatever You Want, Be Sure That Is What You Want; Whatever You Feel, Be Sure That Is What You Feel.

Those Who Arrive At The End Of The Journey Are Not Those Who Began.

Yeats Was The Greatest Poet Of Our Times . . . Certainly The Greatest In This Language, And So Far As I Am Able To Judge, In Any Language.

Disillusion Can Become Itself An Illusion If We Rest In It.

Disillusionment

Gradually We Come To Admit That Shakespeare Understands A Greater Extent And Variety Of Human Life Than Dante; But That Dante Understands Deeper Degrees Of Degradation And Higher Degrees Of Exaltation.

Only Those Who Will Risk Going Too Far Can Possibly Find Out How Far One Can Go.

If Time And Space, As Sages Say, Are Things Which Cannot Be, The Sun Which Does Not Feel Decay No Greater Is Than We. So Why, Love, Should We Ever Pray To Live A Century? The Butterfly That Lives A Day Has Lived Eternity.

I Am No Prophet-and Here's No Great Matter.

There Is No Feeling, Except The Extremes Of Fear And Grief, That Does Not Find Relief In Music.

Again I Must Remind You That A Dog's A Dog-a Cat's A Cat.

Past Art Is Subject To Change.

That Meddling In Other People's Affairs...formerly Conducted By The Most Discreet Intrigue Is Now Openly Advocated Under The Name Of Intervention.

We Should Not Confuse Information With Knowledge.

Home Is Where One Starts From.

What We Call The Beginning Is Often The End. And To Make An End Is To Make A Beginning. The End Is Where We Start From.

A Woman Drew Her Long Black Hair Out Tight, And Fiddled Whisper Music On Those Strings, And Bats With Baby Faces In The Violet Light Whistled, And Beat Their Wings, And Crawled Head Downward Down A Blackened Wall.

A Good Half Of The Effort Of Understanding What The Indian Philosophers Were After - And Their Subtleties Make Most Of The Great European Philosophers Look Like Schoolboys.

A Book Is Not Harmless Merely Because No One Is Consciously Offended By It.

Everyone Gets The Experience. Some Get The Lesson.

When Oxygen And Sulphur Dioxide Are Mixed In The Presence Of A Filiament Of Platinum, They Form Sulphurous Acid. This Combination Takes Place Only If The Platinum Is Present; Nevertheless The Newly Formed Acid Contains No Trace Of Platinum, And The Platinum Itself Is Apparently Unaffected: Has Remained Inert, Neutral, And Unchanged. The Mind Of The Poet Is The Shred Of Platinum.

The Good Poet Welds His Theft Into A Whole Of Feeling Which Is Unique, Utterly Different From That From Which It Was Torn; The Bad Poet Throws It Into Something Which Has No Cohesion.

And They Write Innumerable Books; Being Too Vain And Distracted For Silence: Seeking Every One After His Own Elevation, And Dodging His Emptiness.

A National Culture, If It Is To Flourish, Should Be A Constellation Of Cultures, The Constitutes Of Which, Benefiting Each Other, Benefit The Whole.

Most Of The Evil In This World Is Done By People With Good Intentions.

Humor Is Also A Way Of Saying Something Serious.

I Journeyed To London, To The Timekept City, Where The River Flows, With Foreign Flotations. There I Was Told: We Have Too Many Churches, And Too Few Chop-houses.

We Might Remind Ourselves That Criticism Is As Inevitable As Breathing, And That We Should Be None The Worse For Articulating What Passes In Our Minds When We Read A Book And Feel An Emotion About It, For Criticizing Our Own Minds In Their Work Of Criticism.

I Would Meet You Upon This Honestly. I That Was Near Your Heart Was Removed Therefrom To Lose Beauty In Terror, Terror In Inquisition. I Have Lost My Passion: Why Should I Need To Keep It Since What Is Kept Must Be Adulterated? I Have Lost My Sight, Smell, Hearing, Taste And Touch: How Should I Use Them For Your Closer Contact?

Uncorseted, Her Friendly Bust Gives Promise Of Pneumatic Bliss.

We Learn What Poetry Is - If We Ever Learn - By Reading It.

Humankind Cannot Stand Reality.

If You Want It You Must Obtain It By Great Labor.

Individual Talent

Every End Is A Beginning...and Every Beginning Is An End.

I Am Aware Of The Damp Souls Of Housemaids Sprouting Despondently At Area Gates.

The Winter Evening Settles Down With Smell Of Steaks In Passageways. Six O'clock. The Burnt-out Ends Of Smoky Days. And Now A Gusty Shower Wraps The Grimy Scraps Of Withered Leaves About Your Feet And Newspapers From Vacant Lots; The Showers Beat On Broken Blinds And Chimney-pots, And At The Corner Of The Street A Lonely Cab-horse Steams And Stamps. And Then The Lighting Of The Lamps.

Where Is The Knowledge We Have Lost In Information?

Too Much Information

I Should Have Been A Pair Of Ragged Claws/ Scuttling Across The Floors Of Silent Seas.

No! I Am Not Prince Hamlet, Nor Was Meant To Be; Am An Attendant Lord, One That Will Do To Swell A Progress, Start A Scene Or Two, Advise The Prince; No Doubt, An Easy Tool, Deferential, Glad To Be Of Use, Politic, Cautious, And Meticulous; Full Of High Sentence, But A Bit Obtuse; At Times, Indeed, Almost Ridiculous— Almost, At Times, The Fool.

Poetry Is Not An Assertion Of Truth, But The Making Of That Truth More Fully Real To Us.

Words Strain, Crack And Sometimes Break, Under The Burden, Under The Tension, Slip, Slide, Perish, Decay With Imprecision, Will Not Stay In Place, Will Not Stay Still.

We Can At Least Try To Understand Our Own Motives, Passions, And Prejudices, So As To Be Conscious Of What We Are Doing When We Apeal To Those Of Others. This Is Very Difficult, Because Our Own Prejudice And Emotional Bias Always Seems To Us So Rational.

So I Find Words I Never Thought To Speak In Streets I Never Thought I Should Revisit When I Left My Body On A Distant Shore.

You Do Not Know How Much They Mean To Me, My Friends, And How, How Rare And Strange It Is, To Find In A Life Composed So Much, So Much Of Odds And Ends, (for Indeed I Do Not Love It ... You Knew? You Are Not Blind! How Keen You Are!) To Find A Friend Who Has These Qualities, Who Has, And Gives Those Qualities Upon Which Friendship Lives. How Much It Means That I Say This To You- Without These Friendships-life, What Cauchemar!

Trying To Use Words, And Every Attempt Is A Wholly New Start, And A Different Kind Of Failure Because One Has Only Learnt To Get The Better Of Words For The Thing One No Longer Has To Say, Or The Way In Which One Is No Longer Disposed To Say It. And So Each Venture Is A New Beginning, A Raid On The Inarticulate With Shabby Equipment Always Deteriorating In The General Mess Of Imprecision Of Feeling.

Ash On An Old Man's Sleeve / Is All The Ash The Burnt Roses Leave, / Dust In The Air Suspended / Marks The Place Where A Story Ended.

I Am Moved By Fancies That Are Curled, Around These Images And Cling, The Notion Of Some Infinitely Gentle, Infinitely Suffering Thing.

Think Neither Fear Nor Courage Saves Us. Unnatural Vices Are Fathered By Our Heroism. Virtues Are Forced Upon Us By Our Impudent Crimes. These Tears Are Shaken From The Wrath-bearing Tree.

Maturing As A Poet Means Maturing As The Whole Man, Experiencing New Emotions Appropriate To One's Age, And With The Same Intensity As The Emotions Of Youth.

Every Moment Is A Fresh Beginning.

The Rats Are Underneath The Piles/ The Jew Is Underneath The Lot.

And Voices Singing Out Of Empty Cisterns And Exhausted Wells.

When A Great Poet Has Lived, Certain Things Have Been Done Once For All, And Cannot Be Achieved Again.

In The Last Few Years Everything I'd Done Up To Sixty Or So Has Seemed Very Childish.

A Wrong Attitude Towards Nature Implies, Somewhere, A Wrong Attitude Towards God, And That The Consequence Is An Inevitable Doom. For A Long Enough Time We Have Believed In Nothing But The Values Arising In A Mechanized, Commercialized, Urbanized Way Of Life: It Would Be As Well For Us To Face The Permanent Conditions Upon Which God Allows Us To Live Upon This Planet.

Envy Is Everywhere. Who Is Without Envy? And Most People Are Unaware Or Unashamed Of Being Envious.

You Can Evade Life, But You Can Not Evade Death.

To Do The Useful Thing, To Say The Courageous Thing, To Contemplate The Beautiful Thing: That Is Enough For One Man's Life.

Shape Without Form, Shade Without Color, Paralyzed Force, Gesture Without Motion; Those Who Have Crossed With Direct Eyes, To Death's Other Kingdom Remember Us-if At All-not As Lost Violent Souls, But Only As The Hollow Men The Stuffed Men.

It Is Only In The World Of Objects That We Have Time And Space And Selves.

Do I Dare Disturb The Universe? In A Minute There Is Time For Decisions And Revisions Which A Minute Will Reverse.

I Have Measured Out My Life With Coffee Spoons.

My Name Is Only An Anagram Of Toilets.

The Greatness Of Literature Cannot Be Determined Solely By Literary Standards Though We Must Remember That Whether It Is Literature Or Not Can Be Determined Only By Literary Standards.

April Is The Cruelest Month, Breeding Lilacs Out Of The Dead Land, Mixing Memory And Desire, Stirring Dull Roots With Spring Rain.

Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal.

A Good Deal Of Confusion Could Be Avoided, If We Refrained From Setting Before The Group, What Can Be The Aim Only Of The Individual; And Before Society As A Whole, What Can Be The Aim Only Of The Group.

For Every Life And Every Act Consequence Of Good And Evil Can Be Shown And As In Time Results Of Many Deeds Are Blended So Good And Evil In The End Become Confounded.

The Past And Future / Are Conquered, And Reconciled.

Never Commit Yourself To A Cheese Without Having First Examined It.

Every Nation, Every Race, Has Not Only Its Own Creative, But Its Own Critical Turn Of Mind; And Is Even More Oblivious Of The Shortcomings And Limitations Of Its Critical Habits Than Of Those Of Its Creative Genius.

When A Cat Adopts You, And I Am Not Superstitious At All I Don't Mean Only Black Cats There Is Nothing To Be Done About It Except To Put Up With It And Wait Until The Wind Changes.

I Must Say Bernard Shaw Is Greatly Improved By Music.

If The Lost Word Is Lost, If The Spent Word Is Spent If The Unheard, Unspoken Word Is Unspoken, Unheard; Still Is The Spoken Word, The Word Unheard, The Word Without A Word, The Word Within The World And For The World; And The Light Shone In The Darkness And Against The Word The Unstilled World Still Whirled About The Center Of The Silent Word. Oh My People, What Have I Done Unto Thee. Where Shall The Word Be Found, Where Shall The Word Resound? Not Here, There Is Not Enough Silence

A Heap Of Broken Images, Where The Sun Beats, And The Dead Tree Gives No Shelter, The Cricket No Relief, And The Dry Stone No Sound Of Water. Only There Is Shadow Under This Red Rock, (come In Under The Shadow Of This Red Rock), And I Will Show You Something Different From Either Your Shadow At Morning Striding Behind You Or Your Shadow At Evening Rising To Meet You; I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Dust.

Success Is Relative. It Is What We Make Of The Mess We Have Made Of Things.

It Is Not Necessarily Those Lands Which Are The Most Fertile Or Most Favored In Climate That Seem To Me The Happiest, But Those In Which A Long Struggle Of Adaptation Between Man And His Environment Has Brought Out The Best Qualities Of Both.

Anecdote: It Is By No Means Self-evident That Human Beings Are Most Real When Most Violently Excited; Violent Physical Passions Do Not In Themselves Differentiate Men From Each Other, But Rather Tend To Reduce Them To The Same State.

What Is True, Is True Only For One Time And Only For One Place.

Because These Wings Are No Longer Wings To Fly But Merely Vans To Beat The Air The Air Which Is Now Thoroughly Small And Dry Smaller And Dryer Than The Will Teach Us To Care And Not To Care Teach Us To Sit Still

And The End And The Beginning Were Always There Before The Beginning And After The End.

No University Ought To Be Merely A National Institution....the Universities Should Have Their Common Ideals, They Should Have Their Common Obligations Toward Each Other. They Should Be Independent Of The Governments Of The Countries In Which They Are Situated. They Should Not Be Institutions For The Training Of An Efficient Bureaucracy, Or For Equipping Scientists To Get The Better Of Foreign Scientists; They Should Stand For The Preservation Of Learning, For The Pursuit Of Truth, And In So Far As Men Are Capable Of It, The Attainment Of Wisdom.

I Do Not Know Much About Gods; But I Think That The River Is A Strong Brown God-sullen, Untamed And Intractable.

Any Religion Is Forever In Danger Of Petrifaction Into Mere Ritual And Habit, Though Ritual And Habit Be Essential To Religion.

Our High Respect For A Well Read Person Is Praise Enough For Literature.

I Gotta Use Words To Talk To You.

But It Seems That Something Has Happened That Has Never Happened Before: Though We Know Not Just When, Or Why, Or How, Or Where.

Not Fare Well, But Fare Forward

I Shall Not Want Honor In Heaven For I Shall Meet Sir Philip Sidney And Have Talk With Coriolanus And Other Heroes Of That Kidney.

There Is No Method But To Be Very Intelligent.

I've Been Born, And Once Is Enough.

Nothing Pleases People More Than To Go On Thinking What They Have Always Thought, And At The Same Time Imagine That They Are Thinking Something New And Daring: It Combines The Advantage Of Security And The Delight Of Adventure.

Hell Is Oneself, Hell Is Alone, The Other Figures In It Merely Projections. There Is Nothing To Escape From And Nothing To Escape To. One Is Always Alone.

Stand On The Highest Pavement Of The Stair- Lean On A Garden Urn- Weave, Weave The Sunlight In Your Hair.

Let Us Go Then, You And I, When The Evening Is Spread Out Against The Sky

And Indeed There Will Be Time For The Yellow Smoke That Slides Along The Street Rubbing Its Back Upon The Window-panes; There Will Be Time , There Will Be Time To Prepare A Face To Meet The Faces That You Meet; There Will Be Time To Murder And Create, And Time For All The Works And Days Of Hands That Lift And Drop A Question On Your Plate; Time For You And Time For Me, And Time Yet For A Hundred Indecisions, And For A Hundred Visions And Revisions, Before The Taking Of Toast And Tea.

Till Human Voices Wake Us, And We Drown.

Most Contemporary Novels Are Not Really "written." They Obtain What Reality They Have Largely From An Accurate Rendering Of The Noises That Human Beings Currently Make In Their Daily Simple Needs Of Communication; And What Part Of A Novel Is Not Composed Of These Noises Consists Of A Prose Which Is No More Alive Than That Of A Competent Newspaper Writer Or Government Official. A Prose That Is Altogether Alive Demands Something Of The Reader That The Ordinary Novel-reader Is Not Prepared To Give.

To Become What You Are Not, Behave As You Do Not.

Life Is Long Between The Desire And The Spasm.

For Us, There Is Only The Trying. The Rest Is Not Our Business.

I Confess . . . That I Am Not Myself Very Much Concerned With The Question Of Influence, Or With Those Publicists Who Have Impressed Their Names Upon The Public By Catching The Morning Tide And Rowing Very Vast In The Direction In Which The Current Was Flowing; But Rather That There Should Always Be A Few Writers Preoccupied In Penetrating To The Core Of The Matter, In Trying To Arrive At The Truth And To Set It Forth, Without Too Much Hope, Without Ambition To Alter The Immediate Course Of Affairs, And Without Being Downcast Or Defeated When Nothing Appears To Ensue.

War Among Men Defiles This World.

A Crowd Flowed Over London Bridge, So Many, I Had Not Thought Death Had Undone So Many.

Fare Forward, Travellers! Not Escaping From The Past Into Different Lives, Or Into Any Future; You Are Not The Same People Who Left That Station Or Who Will Arrive At Any Terminus, While The Narrowing Rails Slide Together Behind You.

In My Beginning Is My End.

Honest Criticism And Sensitive Appreciation Are Directed Not Upon The Poet But Upon The Poetry.

There Is No Absolute Point Of View From Which Real And Ideal Can Be Finally Separated And Labelled.

I Grow Old … I Grow Old … I Shall Wear The Bottoms Of My Trousers Rolled.

The Purpose Of A Christian Education Would Not Be Merely To Make Men And Women Pious Christians: A System Which Aimed Too Rigidly At This End Alone Would Become Only Obscurantist. A Christian Education Must Primarily Teach People To Be Able To Think In Christian Categories.

We Must Learn To Suffer More.

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.

There Is, It Seems To Us, At Best, Only A Limited Value In The Knowledge Derived From Experience.

Between The Desire And The Spasm, Between The Potency And The Existence, Between The Essence And The Descent, Falls The Shadow.

The Old Should Be Explorers, Be Curious, Risk Transgression, Explore Oldness Itself.

What Is This Self-inside Us, This Silent Observer, Severe And Speechless Critic, Who Can Terrorize Us, And Urge Us Onto Futile Activity, And In The End, Judge Us Still More Severely For The Errors Into Which His Own Reproaches Drove Us?

The Role Of Art Is Not To Express The Personality But To Overcome It.

The Pekes And The Pollicles, Everyone Knows, Are Proud And Implacable, Passionate Foes; It Is Always The Same, Wherever One Goes. And The Pugs And The Poms, Although Most People Say That They Do Not Like Fighting, Will Often Display Every Symptom Of Wanting To Join In The Fray. And They Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Until You Can Hear Them All Over The Park.

He Who Was Living Is Now Dead We Who Were Living Are Now Dying With A Little Patience.

Thus With Most Careful Devotion Thus With Precise Attention To Detail, Interfering Preparation Of That Which Is Already Prepared Men Lighten The Knot Of Confusion Into Perfect Misunderstanding, Reflecting A Pocket-torch Of Observation.

It's Not Wise To Violate Rules Until You Know How To Observe Them.

Would It Have Been Worth While, To Have Bitten Off The Matter With A Smile, To Have Squeezed The Universe Into A Ball To Roll It Towards Some Overwhelming Question

Bad Poets Imitate, Good Poets Steal.

Except For The Point, The Still Point, There Would Be No Dance, And There Is Only The Dance

Religion, As Distinguished From Modern Paganism, Implies A Life In Conformity With Nature. It May Be Observed That The Natural Life And The Supernatural Life Have A Conformity To Each Other Which Neither Has With The Mechanistic Life...a Wrong Attitude Towards Nature Implies, Somewhere, A Wrong Attitude Towards God...[we Should] Struggle To Recover The Sense Of Relation To Nature And To God.

The Ordinary Man's Experience Is Chaotic, Irregular, Fragmentary. [he] Falls In Love Or Reads Spinoza, And These Two Experiences Have Nothing To Do With Each Other, Or With The Noise Of The Typewriter, Or The Smell Of Cooking; In The Mind Of The Poet These Experiences Are Always Forming New Wholes

Falling In Love

The Nobel Is A Ticket To One's Own Funeral. No One Has Ever Done Anything After He Got It.

Macavity, Macavity, There's No One Like Macavity, There Never Was A Cat Of Such Deceitfulness And Sauvity.

It's Strange That Words Are So Inadequate. Yet, Like The Asthmatic Struggling For Breath, So The Lover Must Struggle For Words.

All Time Is Unreedemable.

I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Dust." T.s. Eliot We Don't Actually Fear Death, We Fear That No One Will Notice Our Absence, That We Will Disappear Without A Trace.

No Scheme For A Change Of Society Can Be Made To Appear Immediately Palatable, Except By Falsehood, Until Society Has Become So Desperate That It Will Accept Any Change.

We Fight For Lost Causes Because We Know That Our Defeat And Dismay May Be The Preface To Our Successors' Victory, Though That Victory Itself Will Be Temporary; We Fight Rather To Keep Something Alive Than In The Expectation That Anything Will Triumph.

In Our Rhythm Of Earthly Life We Tire Of Light. We Are Glad When The Day Ends, When The Play Ends; And Ecstasy Is Too Much Pain.

That Is Not It At All, That Is Not What I Meant, At All.

The Only Hope, Or Else Despair Lies In The Choice Of Pyre Or Pyre - To Be Redeemed From Fire By Fire.

All Significant Truths Are Private Truths. As They Become Public They Cease To Become Truths; They Become Facts, Or At Best, Part Of The Public Character; Or At Worst, Catchwords.

Art Serves Us Best Precisely At That Point Where It Can Shift Our Sense Of What Is Possible, When We Know More Than We Knew Before, When We Feel We Have - By Some Manner Of A Leap - Encountered The Truth. That, By The Logic Of Art, Is Always Worth The Pain.

The Sense Of Wellbeing! Its Often With Us When We Are Young, But Then It's Not Noticed; And By The Time One Has Grown To Consciousness It Comes Less Often.

We Took Up Our Positions, In Obedience To Instructions.

Yet With These April Sunsets, That Somehow Recall My Buried Life, And Paris In The Spring, I Feel Immeasurably At Peace, And Find The World To Be Wonderful And Youthful Afterall

For Last Year's Words Belong To Last Year's Language And Next Year's Words Await Another Voice.

Each Venture Is A New Beginning, A Raid On The Inarticulate With Shabby Equipment Always Deteriorating In The General Mess Of Imprecision Of Feeling.

Because I Know That Time Is Always Time And Place Is Always Place And Only Place. And What Is Actual Is Actual Only For One Time. And Only For One Place. I Rejoice That Things Are As They Are.

And Would It Have Been Worth It, After All, Would It Have Been Worth While, After The Sunsets And The Dooryards And The Sprinkled Streets, After The Novels, After The Teacups, After The Skirts That Trail Along The Floor - And This, And So Much More? -

The Naming Of Cats Is A Difficult Matter

Genuine Poetry Can Communicate Before It Is Understood.

As She Laughed I Was Aware Of Becoming Involved In Her Laughter And Being Part Of It, Until Her Teeth Were Only Accidental Stars With A Talent For Squad-drill.

I Read, Much Of The Night, And Go South In The Winter.

Can We Only Love Something Created In Our Own Imaginations? Are We All In Fact Unloving And Unloveable? 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.

The Historical Sense Involves A Perception, Not Only Of The Pastness Of The Past, But Of Its Presence

Sand. Everywhere. In The Bed, In The Shower, All Over The Floor. Grrrrr.

At The Still Point, There The Dance Is.

The Rum Turn Tugger Is A Terrible Bore: When You Let Him In, Then He Wants To Be Out; He's Always On The Wrong Side Of Every Door, And As Soon As He's At Home, Then He'd Like To Get About.

Cats Must Have Three Names-an Everyday Name, Such As Peter; A More Particular, Dignified Name, Such As Quaxo, Bombalurina, Or Jellylorum; And, Thirdly, The Name The Cat Thinks Up For Himself, His Deep And Inscrutable Singular Name.

There Are Flood And Drought Over The Eyes And In The Mouth, Dead Water And Dead Sand Contending For The Upper Hand. The Parched Eviscerate Soil Gapes At The Vanity Of Toil, Laughs Without Mirth. This Is The Death Of The Earth.

The Winter Evening Settles Down With Smell Of Steaks In Passageways.

You Have To Risk Going Too Far To Discover Just How Far You Can Really Go.

No Generation Is Interested In Art In Quite The Same Way As Any Other; Each Generation, Like Each Individual, Brings To The Contemplation Of Art Its Own Categories Of Appreciation, Makes Its Own Demands Upon Art, And Has Its Own Uses For Art.

The Dove Descending Breaks The Air With Flame Of Incandescent Terror Of Which The Tongues Declare The One Discharge From Sin And Error. The Only Hope, Or Else Despair Lies In The Choice Of Pyre Or Pyre- To Be Redeemed From Fire By Fire. Who Then Devised The Torment? Love. Love Is The Unfamiliar Name Behind The Hands That Wove The Intolerable Shirt Of Flame Which Human Power Cannot Remove. We Only Live, Only Suspire Consumed By Either Fire Or Fire.

If We All Were Judged According To The Consequences Of All Our Words And Deeds, Beyond The Intention And Beyond Our Limited Understanding Of Ourselves And Others, We Should All Be Condemned.

The Destination Cannot Be Described; / You Will Know Very Little Until You Get There; / You Will Journey Blind.

And Went On In Sunlight, Into The Hofgarten, And Drank Coffee, And Talked For An Hour.

In The Faint Moonlight, The Grass Is Singing

[on The Waste Land:] Various Critics Have Done Me The Honor To Interpret The Poem In Terms Of Criticism Of The Contemporary World, Have Considered It, Indeed, As An Important Bit Of Social Criticism. To Me It Was Only The Relief Of A Personal And Wholly Insignificant Grouse Against Life; It Is Just A Piece Of Rhythmical Grumbling.

The Hippopotamus's Day Is Passed In Sleep; At Night He Hunts; God Works In A Mysterious Way- The Church Can Sleep And Feed At Once.

What Profession Is More Trying Than That Of Author? After You Finish A Piece Of Work It Only Seems Good To You For A Few Weeks; Or If It Seems Good At All You Are Convinced That It Is The Last You Will Be Able To Write; And If It Seems Bad You Wonder Whether Everything You Have Done Isn’t Poor Stuff Really; And It Is One Kind Of Agony While You Are Writing, And Another Kind When You Aren’t.

When We Read Of Human Beings Behaving In Certain Ways, With The Approval Of The Author, Who Gives His Benediction To This Behavior By His Attitude Towards The Result Of The Behavior Arranged By Himself, We Can Be Influenced Towards Behaving In The Same Way.

Only Through Time Time Is Conquered

Today, You're Halfway To 100! Here's To Optimism, Whether It Is Realistic Or Not. Happy 50th Birthday!

Survival Is Your Strength Not Your Shame.

Think Not Forever Of Yourselves, O Chiefs, Nor Of Your Own Generation. Think Of Continuing Generations Of Our Families, Think Of Our Grandchildren And Of Those Yet Unborn, Whose Faces Are Coming From Beneath The Ground.

Native American

A Tradition Without Intelligence Is Not Worth Having.

Where Is The Life We Have Lost In Living? Where Is The Wisdom We Have Lost In Knowledge? Where Is The Knowledge We Have Lost In Information?

There Is Not A More Repulsive Spectacle Than On Old Man Who Will Not Forsake The World, Which Has Already Forsaken Him.

Words Move, Music Moves Only In Time; But That Which Is Only Living Can Only Die. Words, After Speech, Reach Into The Silence. Only By The Form, The Pattern, Can Words Or Music Reach The Stillness.

In A World Of Fugitives The One Who Stays Home Will Seem To Be Running Away

Who Is The Third Who Walks Always Beside You? 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?

No Artist Produces Great Art By A Deliberate Attempt To Express His Own Personality.

…forgive Us, O Lord, We Acknowledge Ourselves As Type Of The Common Man, Of The Men And Women Who Shut The Door And Sit By The Fire; Who Fear The Blessing Of God, The Loneliness Of The Night Of God, The Surrender Required, The Deprivation Inflicted; Who Fear The Injustice Of Men Less Than The Justice Of God; Who Fear The Hand At The Window, The Fire In The Thatch, The Fist In The Tavern, The Push Into The Canal, Less Than We Fear The Love Of God.

Home Is Where One Starts From. As We Grow Older The World Becomes Stranger, The Pattern More Complicatied Of Dead And Living, Not The Intense Moment Isolated, With No Before And After, But A Lifetime Burning In Every Moment . . .

Intense Moments

Friendship Should Be More Than Biting Time Can Sever.

Lost Friendship

A Cold Coming We Had Of It, Just The Worst Time Of The Year For A Journey, And Such A Long Journey: The Ways Deep And The Weather Sharp, The Very Dead Of Winter.

Should I, After Tea And Cakes And Ices, Have The Strength To Force The Moment To Its Crisis? But Though I Have Wept And Fasted, Wept And Prayed, Though I Have Seen My Head (grown Slightly Bald) Brought In Upon A Platter, I Am No Prophet--and Here's No Great Matter; I Have Seen The Moment Of My Greatness Flicker, I Have Seen The Eternal Footman Hold My Coat, And Snicker, And In Short, I Was Afraid.

Any Poet, If He Is To Survive Beyond His 25th Year, Must Alter; He Must Seek New Literary Influences; He Will Have Different Emotions To Express.

Television Is A Medium Of Entertainment Which Permits Millions Of People To Listen To The Same Joke At The Same Time, And Yet Remain Lonesome.

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Anne Bradstreet

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