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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.

-T. S. Eliot

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Television Is A Medium

T. S. Eliot

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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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More From T. S. Eliot

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.

Turning Wearily, As One Would Turn To Nod Goodbye To Rochefoucauld, If The Street Were Time And He As The End Of The Street.

These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins

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.

It Is Worth While Dying, To Find Out What Life Is.

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.

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

The Soul Of Man Must Quicken To Creation.

Destiny Waits In The Hand Of God, Not In The Hands Of Statesmen.

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.

Justice Itself Tends To Be Corrupted By Political Passion.

The Name That No Human Research Can Discover-- But The Cat Himself Knows, And Will Never Confess. When You Notice A Cat In Profound Meditation, The Reason, I Tell You, Is Always The Same: His Mind Is Engaged In A Rapt Contemplation Of The Thought, Of The Thought, Of The Thought Of His Name: His Ineffable Effable Effanineffable Deep And Inscrutable Singular Name.

And Through The Spaces Of The Dark Midnight Shakes The Memory As A Madman Shakes A Dead Geranium.

And Indeed There Will Be Time To Wonder, 'do I Dare?', And 'do I Dare?

What A Poem Means Is As Much What It Means To Others As What It Means To The Author; And Indeed, In The Course Of Time A Poet May Become Merely Reader In Respect To His Own Works, Forgetting His Original Meaning.

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

A Wrong Attitude Toward Nature Implies, Somewhere, A Wrong Attitude Toward God.

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.

Men Live By Forgetting And Woman Live On Memories.

The Young Feel Tired At The End Of An Action, The Old At The Beginning.

Every Experience Is A Paradox In That It Means To Be Absolute, And Yet Is Relative; In That It Somehow Always Goes Beyond Itself And Yet Never Escapes Itself.

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.

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.

A Good Poet Will Usually Borrow From Authors Remote In Time, Or Alien In Language, Or Diverse In Interest.

The Circle Of Our Understanding Is A Very Restricted Area.

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

Turn Things You've Always Wanted To Do, Into Things You've Done

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

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.

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

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.

An Election Is Coming. Universal Peace Is Declared And The Foxes Have A Sincere Interest In Prolonging The Lives Of The Poultry.

Love Is Most Nearly Itself When Here And Now Cease To Matter.

I Must Say Bernard Shaw Is Greatly Improved By Music.

The Tiger Springs In The New Year. Us He Devours.

O Lord, Deliver Me From The Man Of Excellent Intention And Impure Heart: For The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, And Desperately Wicked.

We Are Not Here To Triumph By Fighting, By Strata Gem, Or By Resistance, Not To Fight With Beasts As Men. We Have Fought The Beast And Have Conquered. We Have Only To Conquer Now, By Suffering. This Is The Easier Victory.

The Darkness Declares The Glory Of Light.

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.

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.

At The Still Point, There The Dance Is.

You Will Find That You Survive Humiliation. And That's An Experience Of Incalculable Value.

Thought Provoking

In The Life Of One Man, Never The Same Time Returns.

The Progress Of An Artist Is A Continual Self-sacrifice, A Continual Extinction Of Personality.

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.

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

The Usual Dog About The Town Is Much Inclined To Play The Clown.

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

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

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

The River Itself Has No Beginning Or End. In Its Beginning, It Is Not Yet The River; In The End It Is No Longer The River. What We Call The Headwaters Is Only A Selection From Among The Innumerable Sources Which Flow Together To Compose It. At What Point In Its Course Does The Mississippi Become What The Mississippi Means?

Ambition Fortifies The Will Of Man To Become Ruler Over Other Men: It Operates With Deception, Cajolery, And Violence, It Is The Action Of Impurity Upon Impurity.

We Took Up Our Positions, In Obedience To Instructions.

Talent Imitates, Genius Steals.

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.

In A World Of Fugitives, The Person Taking The Opposite Direction Will Appear To Run Away.

As A Rule, With Me An Unfinished [idea] Is A Thing That Might As Well Be Rubbed Out. It's Better, If There's Something Good In It That I Might Make Use Of Elsewhere, To Leave It At The Back Of My Mind Than On Paper In A Drawer. If I Leave It In A Drawer It Remains The Same Thing But If It's In The Memory It Becomes Transformed Into Something Else.

The Great Ages Did Not Contain The Best Talent, They Wasted Less.

I Take As Metaphysical Poetry That In Which What Is Ordinarily Apprehensible Only By Thought Is Brought Within The Grasp Of Feeling, Or That In Which What Is Ordinarily Only Felt Is Transformed Into Thought Without Ceasing To Be Feeling.

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

Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal.

Our Emotions Are Only “incidents” In The Effort To Keep Day And Night Together.

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.

Here Were Decent Godless People; Their Only Monument The Asphalt Road And A Thousand Lost Golf Balls.

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.

Cold Mountain Buddhas Han Shan Wait Without Thought, For You Are Not Ready For Thought: So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness Be Dancing. Whisper Of Running Streams, And Winter Lightning. The Wild Thyme Unseen And The Wild Strawberry, The Laughter In The Garden, Echoed Ecstasy Not Lost, But Requiring, Pointing To The Agony Of Death And Birth.

Where Shall The Word Be Found, Where Will The Word / Resound? Not Here, There Is Not Enough Silence.

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

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

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.

Uncorseted, Her Friendly Bust Gives Promise Of Pneumatic Bliss.

We Must Always Take Risks. That Is Our Destiny.

Paint Me The Bold Anfractuous Rocks Faced By The Snarled And Yelping Seas.

Tennyson And Browning Are Poets, And They Think; But They Do Not Feel Their Thought As Immediately As The Odour Of A Rose. A Thought To Donne Was An Experience; It Modified His Sensibility.

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

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

Individual Talent

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.

And The Lost Heart Stiffens And Rejoices In The Lost Lilac And The Lost Sea Voices And The Weak Spirit Quickens To Rebel For The Bent Golden-rod And The Lost Sea Smell Quickens To Recover.

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.

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 A Toast And Tea.

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

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.

It Is Impossible To Say Just What I Mean!

Words Strain, Crack, And Sometime Break, Under The Burden.

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

If You Start With A Bang, You Won't End With A Whimper.

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

Disillusionment

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.

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.

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

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?

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

After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?

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

My Life Is Light, Waiting For The Death Wind, Like A Feather On The Back Of My Hand.

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.

We Had The Experience, But We Missed The Meaning.

The Only Wisdom We Can Hope To Acquire Is The Wisdom Of Humility: Humility Is Endless. The Houses Are All Gone Under The Sea. The Dancers Are All Gone Under The Hill.

[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.

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

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

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.

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.

Webster Was Much Possessed By Death And Saw The Skull Beneath The Skin.

Between The Vision And The Act Lies The Shadow.

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

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.

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

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

Wait Without Thought, For You Are Not Ready For Thought.

Distracted From Distraction By Distraction

The Soul Is So Far From Being A Monad That We Have Not Only To Interpret Other Souls To Ourself But To Interpret Ourself To Ourself.

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

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.

The Last Thing One Discovers In Composing A Work Is What To Put First.

Every Moment Is A Fresh Beginning.

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

Anxiety Is The Hand Maiden Of Creativity.

O Dark Dark Dark. They All Go Into The Dark, The Vacant Interstellar Spaces, The Vacant Into The Vacant

The Majority Of Poems One Outgrows And Outlives, As One Outgrows And Outlives The Majority Of Human Passions.

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

When War Is Not Just It Is Subsequently Justified; So It Becomes Many Things. In Reality, An Unjust War Is Merely Piracy. It Consists Of Piracy, Ego And, More Than Anything, Money. War Is Our Century's Prostitution.

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

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.

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.

These Are Only Hints And Guesses, Hints Followed By Guesses; And The Rest Is Prayer, Observance, Discipline, Thought And Action.

For He Will Do As He Do Do And There's No Doing Anything About It!

There Is No Escape From Metre; There Is Only Mastery.

For Love Would Be Love Of The Wrong Thing; There Is Yet Faith, But The Faith And The Love And The Hope Are All In The Waiting.

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

Men Dislike Being Awakened From Their Death In Life.

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 End Is In The Beginning.

It Is In Fact A Part Of The Function Of Education To Help Us Escape, Not From Our Own Time - For We Are Bound By That - But From The Intellectual And Emotional Limitations Of Our Time.

Thinking Of The Key, Each Confirms A Prison.

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

Let's Not Be Narrow, Nasty, And Negative.

My Name Is Only An Anagram Of Toilets.

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.

Bad Poets Imitate, Good Poets Steal.

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.

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.

Stealing Things

Humankind Cannot Stand Reality.

Love Is Most Nearly Itself When Here And Now Cease To Matter. Old Men Ought To Be Explorers Here Or There Does Not Matter We Must Be Still And Still Moving Into Another Intensity For A Further Union, A Deeper Communion Through The Dark Cold And The Empty Desolation, The Wave Cry, The Wind Cry, The Vast Waters Of The Petrel And The Porpoise.

Not Only Every Great Poet, But Every Genuine, But Lesser Poet, Fulfils Once For All Some Possibility Of Language, And So Leaves One Possibility Less For His Successors.

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

The Hint Half Guessed, The Gift Half Understood, Is Incarnation. Here The Impossible Union Of Spheres Of Existence Is Actual. Here The Past And Future Are Conquered And Reconciled.

Only Through Time Time Is Conquered

I've Been Born, And Once Is Enough.

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.

I Must Tell You That I Should Really Like To Think There's Something Wrong With Me- Because, If There Isn't, Then There's Something Wrong With The World Itself-and That's Much More Frightening! That Would Be Terrible. So I'd Rather Believe There Is Something Wrong With Me, That Could Be Put Right.

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

My Greatest Trouble Is Getting The Curtain Up And Down.

Where There Is No Temple There Shall Be No Homes.

People Exercise An Unconscious Selection In Being Influenced.

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

Poetry May Make Us From Time To Time A Little More Aware Of The Deeper, Unnamed Feelings Which Form The Substratum Of Our Being, To Which We Rarely Penetrate; For Our Lives Are Mostly A Constant Evasion Of Ourselves.

Dayodhuam: I Have Heard The Key Turn In The Door Once And Turn Once Only We Think Of The Key, Each In His Prison Thinking Of The Key, Each Confirms A Prison.

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

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

I Learn A Great Deal By Merely Observing You, And Letting You Talk As Long As You Please, And Taking Note Of What You Do Not Say.

It Is Self-evident That St. Louis Affected Me More Deeply Than Any Other Environment Has Ever Done. I Feel That There Is Something In Having Passed One's Childhood Beside The Big River, Which Is Incommunicable To Those People Who Have Not. I Consider Myself Fortunate To Have Been Born Here, Rather Than In Boston, Or New York, Or London.

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

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.

Not Less Of Love, But Expanding Of Love Beyond Desire, And So Liberation From The Future As Well As The Past.

To Each Individual The World Will Take On A Different Connotation Of Meaning-the Important Lies In The Desire To Search For An Answer.

Love Compels Cruelty To Those Who Do Not Understand Love.

This Is The Way The World Ends, Not With A Bang, But A Whimper.

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.

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

We Shall Not Cease From Exploring, And The End Of Our Exploring Will Be To Arrive Where We Started And Know The Place For The First Time.

I Believe The Moment Of Birth Is When We Have Knowledge Of Death I Believe The Season Of Birth Is The Season Of Sacrifice.

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

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

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

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.

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

It Has Frequently Been Said That We Never Desire What We Think Absolutely Inapprehensible: It Is However True That Some Of Our Sharpest Agonies Are Those In Which The Object Of Desire Is Regarded As Both Possible And Imaginary.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Friendship Should Be More Than Biting Time Can Sever.

Lost Friendship

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

There Is No Method But To Be Very Intelligent.

The Majority Of Mankind Is Lazyminded, Incurious, Absorbed In Vanities, And Tepid In Emotion, And Is Therefore Incapable Of Either Much Doubt Or Much Faith.

The Last Temptation Is The Greatest Treason: To Do The Right Deed For The Wrong Reason.

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.

Gin And Drugs, Dear Lady, Gin And Drugs.

They Don't Understand What It Is To Be Awake, / To Be Living On Several Planes At Once / Though One Cannot Speak With Several Voices At Once.

History Has Many Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors And Issues.

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

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.

I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Dust.

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.

You Gave Me Hyacinths First A Year Ago; They Called Me The Hyacinth Girl.' —yet When We Came Back, Late, From The Hyacinth Garden, Your Arms Full, And Your Hair Wet, I Could Not Speak, And My Eyes Failed, I Was Neither Living Nor Dead, And I Knew Nothing, Looking Into The Heart Of Light, The Silence. Od' Und Leer Das Meer.

The Definition Of Hell Is A Place Where Nothing Connects With Nothing.

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