Background Image

...

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.

-T. S. Eliot

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Most Contemporary Novels Are

T. S. Eliot

...

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.

Views: 7

Topic

More From T. S. Eliot

O Father, Father Gone From Us, Lost To Us, The Church Lies Bereft, Alone, Desecrated, Desolated. And The Heathen Shall Build On The Ruins Their World Without God. I See It. I See It.

The More Perfect The Artist, The More Completely Separate In Him Will Be The Man Who Suffers And The Mind Which Creates.

We Should Not Confuse Information With Knowledge.

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.

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

Poetry Should Help, Not Only To Refine The Language Of The Time, But To Prevent It From Changing Too Rapidly.

Where There Is No Temple There Shall Be No Homes.

I Do Not Believe That Any Writer Has Ever Exposed This Bovarysme, The Human Will To See Things As They Are Not, More Clearly Than Shakespeare.

That Was My Way Of Putting It-not Very Satisfactory: A Periphrastic Study In A Worn-out Poetical Fashion, Leaving One Still With The Intolerable Wrestle With Words And Meanings.

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.

You Must Not On Any Account Give Me Credit For Being Penetrating. I Have Impressed People That Way Before, And The Result Is Always Disaster.

It Will Do You No Harm To Find Yourself Ridiculous. Resign Yourself To Be The Fool You Are... ...we Must Always Take Risks. That Is Our Destiny.

Finding Yourself

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

Because I Do Not Hope To Turn Again Because I Do Not Hope Because I Do Not Hope To Turn Desiring This Man's Gift And That Man's Scope I No Longer Strive To Strive Towards Such Things (why Should The Aged Eagle Stretch Its Wings?) Why Should I Mourn The Vanished Power Of The Usual Reign?

Humankind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality.

All Time Is Unreedemable.

I Was Too Slow A Mover To Be A Boxer. It Was Much Easier To Be A Poet.

With Cats, Some Say, One Rule Is True: Don’t Speak Till You Are Spoken To. Myself, I Do Not Hold With That — I Say, You Should Ad-dress A Cat. But Always Keep In Mind That He Resents Familiarity. I Bow, And Taking Off My Hat, Ad-dress Him In This Form: O Cat! But If He Is The Cat Next Door, Whom I Have Often Met Before (he Comes To See Me In My Flat) I Greet Him With An Oopsa Cat! I Think I've Heard Them Call Him James — But We've Not Got So Far As Names.

We Ask Only To Be Reassured About The Noises In The Cellar And The Window That Should Not Have Been Open

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.

We Must Learn To Suffer More.

I Suspect That In Our Loathing Of Totalitarianism, There Is Infused A Good Deal Of Admiration For Its Efficiency.

Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal.

War Is Not A Life: It Is A Situation, One Which May Neither Be Ignored Nor Accepted.

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

The Dripping Blood Our Only Drink, The Bloody Flesh Our Only Food: In Spite Of Which We Like To Think That We Are Sound, Substantial Flesh And Blood Again, In Spite Of That, We Call This Friday Good.

Tradition: How The Vitality Of The Past Enriches The Life Of The Present.

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?

The Immature Poet Imitates, The Mature Poet Plagiarizes.

There Is No Such Thing As A Lost Cause, Because There Is No Such Thing As A Gained Cause

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.

…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.

There Will Be Time To Murder And Create.

As Things Are, And As Fundamentally They Must Always Be, Poetry Is Not A Career, But A Mug's Game. No Honest Poet Can Ever Feel Quite Sure Of The Permanent Value Of What He Has Written: He May Have Wasted His Time And Messed Up His Life For Nothing.

Death Has A Hundred Hands And Walks By A Thousand Ways.

People Are Only Influenced In The Direction In Which They Want To Go, And Influence Consists Largely In Making Them Conscious Of Their Wishes To Proceed In That Direction.

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

As We Grow Older, The World Becomes Stranger, The Pattern More Complicated Of Dead And Living.

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.

No One Can Become Really Educated Without Having Pursued Some Study In Which He Took No Interest- For It Is A Part Of Education To Learn To Interest Ourselves In Subjects For Which We Have No Aptitude.

Finding A Way To Live The Simple Life Is One Of Life's Supreme Complications.

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.

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.

History Has Many Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors And Issues.

Everyone's Alone - Or So It Seems To Me. They Make Noises, And Think They Are Talking To Each Other; They Make Faces, And Think They Understand Each Other. And I'm Sure They Don't. Is That A Delusion?

My Mind May Be American But My Heart Is British.

All Art Emulates The Condition Of Ritual. That Is What It Comes From And To That It Must Always Return For Nourishment.

Now That Lilacs Are In Bloom She Has A Bowl Of Lilacs In Her Room And Twists One In Her Fingers While She Talks. "ah, My Friend, You Do Not Know, You Do Not Know What Life Is, You Who Hold It In Your Hands"; (slowly Twisting The Lilac Stalks) "you Let It Flow From You, You Let It Flow, And Youth Is Cruel, And Has No Remorse And Smiles At Situations Which It Cannot See." I Smile, Of Course, And Go On Drinking Tea.

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.

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

Probably, Indeed, The Larger Part Of The Labor Of An Author Composing His Work Is Critical Labor; The Labor Of Sifting, Combining, Constructing, Expunging, Correcting, Testing. This Frightful Toil Is As Much Critical As Creative.

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

So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness The Dancing.

No Poet, No Artist Of Any Art, Has His Complete Meaning Alone. His Significance, His Appreciation Is The Appreciation Of His Relation To The Dead Poets And Artists. You Cannot Value Him Alone; You Must Set Him, For Contrast And Comparison, Among The Dead.

We Had The Experience, But We Missed The Meaning.

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.

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

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.

We Are The Hollow Men We Are The Stuffed Men Leaning Together...

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

When A Poet's Mind Is Perfectly Equipped For Its Work, It Is Constantly Amalgamating Disparate Experience ?in The Mind Of The Poet These Experiences Are Always Forming New Wholes.

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.

Only Through Time Time Is Conquered

I Am Glad You Have A Cat, But I Do Not Believe It Is So Remarkable A Cat As My Cat.

Let Us Go Then, You And I, When The Evening Is Spread Out Against The Sky Like A Patient Etherised Upon A Table; Let Us Go, Through Certain Half-deserted Streets, The Muttering Retreats 5 Of Restless Nights In One-night Cheap Hotels And Sawdust Restaurants With Oyster-shells: Streets That Follow Like A Tedious Argument Of Insidious Intent To Lead You To An Overwhelming Question … 10 Oh, Do Not Ask, “what Is It?” Let Us Go And Make Our Visit. In The Room The Women Come And Go Talking Of Michelangelo.

Our Lives Are Mostly A Constant Evasion Of Ourselves, And Of Our Visible, Sensible World.

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

The Hint Half Guessed, The Gift Half Understood, Is Incarnation.

Good Poets Borrow, Great Poets Steal

In Order To Arrive At What You Are Not, You Must Go Through The Way In Which You Are Not.

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

The Poet's Mind Is In Fact A Receptacle For Seizing And Storing Up Numberless Feelings, Phrases, Images, Which Remain There Until All The Particles Which Can Unite To Form A New Compound Are Present Together.

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.

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.

Whatever You Do, Don't Whimper, But Take The Consequences.

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!

My Greatest Trouble Is Getting The Curtain Up And Down.

We Must Always Take Risks. That Is Our Destiny.

Footfalls Echo In The Memory, Down The Passage We Did Not Take, Towards The Door We Never Opened, Into The Rose Garden.

When The Stranger Says: "what Is The Meaning Of This City? Do You Huddle Close Together Because You Love Each Other?" What Will You Answer? "we All Dwell Together To Make Money From Each Other"? Or "this Is A Community"? Oh My Soul, Be Prepared For The Coming Of The Stranger. Be Prepared For Him Who Knows How To Ask Questions.

Redeem The Time. Redeem The Unread Vision Of A Higher Dream.

And Now You Live Dispersed On Ribbon Roads, And No Man Knows Or Cares Who Is His Neighbor Unless His Neighbor Makes Too Much Disturbance, But All Dash To And Fro In Motor Cars, Familiar With The Roads And Settled Nowhere.

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.

Dear Mother, I Am Getting On Nicely In My Work At The Bank, And Like It ... I Want To Find Out Something About The Science Of Money While I Am At It; It Is An Extraordinarily Interesting Subject.

I Have Seen The Moment Of My Greatness Flicker, And I Have Seen The Eternal Footman Hold My Coat, And Snicker, And In Short, I Was Afraid.

Music Heard So Deeply That It Is Not Heard At All, But You Are The Music While The Music Lasts.

Love Compels Cruelty To Those Who Do Not Understand Love.

We Are Being Made Aware That The Organization Of Society On The Principle Of Private Profit, As Well As Public Destruction, Is Leading Both To The Deformation Of Humanity By Unregulated Industrialism, And To The Exhaustion Of Natural Resources, And That A Good Deal Of Our Material Progress Is A Progress For Which Succeeding Generations May Have To Pay Dearly.

The Endless Cycle Of Idea And Action, Endless Invention, Endless Experiment, Brings Knowledge Of Motion, But Not Of Stillness; Knowledge Of Speech, But Not Of Silence; Knowledge Of Words, And Ignorance Of The Word. All Our Knowledge Brings Us Nearer To Our Ignorance, All Our Ignorance Brings Us Nearer To Death, But Nearness To Death No Nearer To God. 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? The Cycles Of Heaven In Twenty Centuries Bring Us Farther From God And Nearer To The Dust.

I Have Heard The Mermaids Singing, Each To Each. I Do Not Think That They Will Sing To Me.

Love Is The Unfamiliar Name Behind The Hands That Wove The Intolerable Shirt Of Flame Which Human Power Cannot Remove.

Time Past And Time Future Allow But A Little Consciousness. To Be Conscious Is Not To Be In Time.

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

To Men Of A Certain Type The Suspicion That They Are Incapable Of Loving Is As Disturbing To Their Self-esteem As, In Cruder Men, The Fear Of Impotence.

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.

I Think We Are In Rats’ Alley Where The Dead Men Lost Their Bones.

At The Still Point, There The Dance Is.

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.

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.

Between The Vision And The Act Lies The Shadow.

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.

To Make An End Is To Make A Beginning.

When Forced To Work Within A Strict Framework, The Imagination Is Taxed To Its Utmost And Will Produce Its Richest Ideas. Given Total Freedom, The Work Is Likely To Sprawl.

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.

It Is A Test (a Positive Test, I Do Not Assert That It Is Always Valid Negatively), That Genuine Poetry Can Communicate Before It Is Understood.

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.

Poetry Is Not A Turning Loose Of Emotion, But An Escape From Emotion; It Is Not The Expression Of Personality, But An Escape From Personality. But, Of Course, Only Those Who Have Personality And Emotions Know What It Means To Want To Escape From These Things.

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.

It Is Generally A Feminine Eye That First Detects The Moral Deficiencies Hidden Under The 'dear Deceit' Of Beauty.

Hungry Hatred, Will Not Strive Against Intelligence Self-interest.

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.

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

Men Dislike Being Awakened From Their Death In Life.

Uncorseted, Her Friendly Bust Gives Promise Of Pneumatic Bliss.

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

All Our Knowledge Brings Us Nearer To Our Ignorance.

In Spite Of All The Dishonour, The Broken Standards, The Broken Lives, The Broken Faith In One Place Or Another, There Was Something Left That Was More Than The Tales Of Old Men On Winter Evenings.

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

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

Knowledge Is Invariably A Matter Of Degree: You Cannot Put Your Finger Upon Even The Simplest Datum And Say This We Know.

The Single Rose Is Now The Garden Where All Loves End

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.

If All Time Is Eternally Present, All Time Is Unredeemable

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.

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 Don't Believe One Grows Older. I Think That What Happens Early On In Life Is That At A Certain Age One Stands Still And Stagnates.

Sister, Mother And Spirit Of The River, Spirit Of The Sea, Suffer Me Not To Be Separated And Let My Cry Come Unto Thee.

Between The Conception And The Creation, Between The Emotion And The Response, Falls The Shadow.

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.

In The Room The Women Come And Go Talking Of Michelangelo.

Unreal Friendship May Turn To Real But Real Friendship, Once Ended, Cannot Be Mended

I Said To My Soul, Be Still And Wait Without Hope, For Hope Would Be Hope For The Wrong Thing; Wait Without Love, For Love Would Be Love Of The Wrong Thing; There Is Yet Faith, But The Faith And The Love Are All In The Waiting. Wait Without Thought, For You Are Not Ready For Thought: So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness The Dancing.

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.

The Chief Danger About Paris Is That It Is Such A Strong Stimulant.

We Fight To Keep Something Alive Rather Than In The Expectation That Anything Will Triumph.

To Country People Cows Are Mild, And Flee From Any Stick They Throw; But I’m A Timid Town Bred Child, And All The Cattle Seem To Know.

Amongst The Rock One Cannot Stop Or Think

From A Purely External Point Of View There Is No Will; And To Find Will In Any Phenomenon Requires A Certain Empathy; We Observe Aman's Actions And Place Ourselves Partly But Not Wholly In His Position; Or We Act, And Place Ourselves Partly In The Position Of An Outsider.

Poets In Our Civilization, As It Exists At Present, Must Be Difficult...the Poet Must Become More And More Comprehensive, More Allusive, More Indirect, In Order To Force, To Dislocate If Necessary, Language Into Its Meaning.

For Most Of Us, There Is Only The Unattended Moment, The Moment In And Out Of Time, The Distraction Fit, Lost In A Shaft Of Sunlight, The Wild Thyme Unseen, Or The Winter Lightning Or The Waterfall, Or Music Heard So Deeply That It Is Not Heard At All, But You Are The Music While The Music Lasts

And All Shall Be Well And/ All Manner Of Thing Shall Be Well/ By The Purification Of The Motive/ In The Ground Of Our Beseeching

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

He Had A Mind So Fine That No Idea Could Violate It

We Shall Not Cease From Exploration And The End Of All Our Exploring Will Be To Arrive Where We Started And Know The Place For The First Time. Through The Unknown, Remembered Gate When The Last Of Earth Left To Discover Is That Which Was The Beginning; At The Source Of The Longest River The Voice Of The Hidden Waterfall And The Children In The Apple-tree Not Known, Because Not Looked For But Heard, Half-heard, In The Stillness Between Two Waves Of The Sea.

Someone Said, 'the Dead Writers Are Remote From Us Because We Know So Much More Than They Did.' Precisely, And They Are That Which We Know.

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

These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins

We Have Lingered In The Chambers Of The Sea By Sea-girls Wreathed With Seaweed Red And Brown Till Human Voices Wake Us... And We Drown.

Birth, And Copulation, And Death; That's All The Facts When You Come To Brass Tacks.

Culture Is The One Thing That We Cannot Deliberately Aim At. It Is The Product Of A Variety Of More Or Less Harmonious Activities, Each Pursued For Its Own Sake.

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

A Thousand Policemen Directing Traffic Cannot Tell You Why You Come Or Where You Go.

Men Live By Forgetting And Woman Live On Memories.

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.

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

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

One Of The Surest Tests Of The Superiority Or Inferiority Of A Poet Is The Way In Which A Poet Borrows. Immature Poets Imitate Mature Poets Steal Bad Poets Deface What They Take And Good Poets Make It Into Something Better Or At Least Something Different. The Good Poet Welds His Theft Into A Whole Of Feeling Which Is Unique Utterly Different Than That From Which It Is Torn The Bad Poet Throws It Into Something Which Has No Cohesion. A Good Poet Will Usually Borrow From Authors Remote In Time Or Alien In Language Or Diverse In Interest.

Stealing Things

Humankind Can't Stand Too Much Reality.

April Is The Cruellest Month.

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.

Poetry Is A Mug's Game.

At The Still Point Of The Turning World. Neither Flesh Nor Fleshless; Neither From Nor Towards; At The Still Point, There The Dance Is.

Art Never Improves, But... The Material Of Art Is Never Quite The Same.

No Place Of Grace For Those Who Avoid The Face. No Time To Rejoice For Those Who Walk Among Noise And Deny The Voice.

For You Know Only A Heap Of Broken Images

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.

To Arrive Where You Are, To Get From Where You Are Not, You Must Go By A Way Wherein There Is No Ecstasy. In Order To Arrive At What You Do Not Know You Must Go By A Way Which Is The Way Of Ignorance. In Order To Possess What You Do Not Possess You Must Go By The Way Of Dispossession. In Order To Arrive At What You Are Not You Must Go Through The Way In Which You Are Not. And What You Do Not Know Is The Only Thing You Know And What You Own Is What You Do Not Own And Where You Are Is Where You Are Not.

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

To Arrive Where You Are, To Get From Where You Are Not / You Must Go By A Way Wherein There Is No Ecstasy.

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.

We Can Say Of Shakespeare, That Never Has A Man Turned So Little Knowledge To Such Great Account.

In Order To Possess What You Do Not Possess, You Must Go By The Way Of Dispossession.

When The Whole World Is Running Headlong Towards The Precipice, One Who Walks In The Opposite Direction Is Looked At As Being Crazy.

The Difference Between Being An Elder Statesman And Posing Successfully As An Elder Statesman Is Practically Negligible.

There's No Vocabulary For Love Within A Family, Love That's Lived In But Not Looked At, Love Within The Light Of Which All Else Is Seen, The Love Within Which All Other Love Finds Speech. This Love Is Silent.

We Do Not Quite Say That The New Is More Valuable Because It Fits In; But Its Fitting In Is A Test Of Its Value - A Test, It Is True, Which Can Only Be Slowly And Cautiously Applied, For We Are None Of Us Infallible Judges Of Conformity.

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.

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.

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 For That Particular Emotion; Such That When The External Facts, Which Must Terminate In Sensory Experience, Are Given, The Emotion Is Immediately Evoked.

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.

Immature Poets Imitate; Mature Poets Steal.

The Past And Future / Are Conquered, And Reconciled.

Dante And Shakespeare Divide The World Between Them. There Is No Third.

I Said To My Soul, Be Still, And Wait Without Hope, For Hope Would Be Hope For The Wrong Thing.

Thinking Of The Key, Each Confirms A Prison.

But At My Back From Time To Time I Hear The Sound Of Horns And Motors, Which Shall Bring Sweeney To Mrs. Porter In The Spring. O The Moon Shone Bright On Mrs. Porter And On Her Daughter They Wash Their Feet In Soda Water.

Teach Us To Care And Not To Care

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.

Survival Is Your Strength Not Your Shame.

Philosophy: A Purple Bullfinch In A Lilac Tree.

Genuine Blasphemy, Genuine In Spirit And Not Purely Verbal, Is The Product Of Partial Belief, And Is As Impossible To The Complete Atheist As To The Perfect Christian.

Artistic Inevitability Lies In The Complete Adequacy Of The External To The Emotion.

Talent Imitates, But Genius Steals.

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

The Civil War Is Not Ended: I Question Whether Any Serious Civil War Ever Does End.

The Lot Of Man Is Ceaseless Labor, Or Ceaseless Idleness, Which Is Still Harder.

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

Writing Every Day Is A Way Of Keeping The Engine Running, And Then Something Good May Come Out Of It.

We Shall Not Cease From Exploration

This Is One Moment, / But Know That Another / Shall Pierce You With A Sudden Painful Joy.

Trending Author

Tatiana Maslany

Humphrey Bogart

James M. Barrie

Category