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The Tendency Of Liberals Is To Create Bodies Of Men And Women-of All Classes-detached From Tradition, Alienated From Religion, And Susceptible To Mass Suggestion-mob Rule. And A Mob Will Be No Less A Mob If It Is Well Fed, Well Clothed, Well Housed, And Well Disciplined.

-T. S. Eliot

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The Tendency Of Liberals

T. S. Eliot

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The Tendency Of Liberals Is To Create Bodies Of Men And Women-of All Classes-detached From Tradition, Alienated From Religion, And Susceptible To Mass Suggestion-mob Rule. And A Mob Will Be No Less A Mob If It Is Well Fed, Well Clothed, Well Housed, And Well Disciplined.

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I Am An Anglo-catholic In Religion, A Classicist In Literature And A Royalist In Politics.

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.

The Journey, Not The Destination Matters.

People To Whom Nothing Has Ever Happened Cannot Understand The Unimportance Of Events.

I Do Not Approve The Extermination Of The Enemy; The Policy Of Exterminating Or, As It Is Barbarously Said, Liquidating Enemies, Is One Of The Most Alarming Developments Of Modern War And Peace, From The Point Of View Of Those Who Desire The Survival

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

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.

A People Without History Is Not Redeemed From Time, For History Is A Pattern Of Timeless Moments.

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

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.

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.

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

Those Who Talk Of The Bible As A Monument Of English Prose Are Merely Admiring It As A Monument Over The Grave Of Christianity.

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

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

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

In A Mind Charged With An Eager Purpose And An Unfinished Vindictiveness, There Is No Room For New Feelings.

Every Phrase And Every Sentence Is An End And A Beginning, Every Poem An Epitaph.

Every Moment Is A Fresh Beginning.

I Must Say Bernard Shaw Is Greatly Improved By Music.

We Took Up Our Positions, In Obedience To Instructions.

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

Half Of The Harm That Is Done In This World Is Due To People Who Want To Feel Important. They Don't Mean To Do Harm. But The Harm Does Not Interest Them.

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.

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

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.

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

To Justify Christian Morality Because It Provides A Foundation Of Morality, Instead Of Showing The Necessity Of Christian Morality From The Truth Of Christianity, Is A Very Dangerous Inversion.

The Greatest Proof Of Christianity For Others Is Not How Far A Man Can Logically Analyze His Reasons For Believing, But How Far In Practice He Will Stake His Life On His Belief.

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.

No Poet, No Artist Of Any Art, Has His Complete Meaning Alone.

Individual Talent

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

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.

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.

Only By Acceptance Of The Past, Can You Alter It

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

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.

It Is Not Enough To Understand What We Ought To Be, Unless We Know What We Are; And We Do Not Understand What We Are, Unless We Know What We Ought To Be.

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?

Destiny ... A Word Which Means More Than We Can Find Any Definitions For. It Is A Word Which Can Have No Meaning In A Mechanical Universe: If That Which Is Wound Up Must Run Down, What Destiny Is There In That? Destiny Is Not Necessitarianism, And It Is Not Caprice: It Is Something Essentially Meaningful. Each Man Has His Destiny, Though Some Men Are Undoubtedly "men Of Destiny" In A Sense In Which Most Men Are Not.

History May Be Servitude. History May Be Freedom. See, Now They Vanish. The Faces And Places, With The Self Which, As It Could, Loved Them, To Become Renewed, Transfigured, In Another Pattern.

For You Know Only A Heap Of Broken Images

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

A Prose That Is Altogether Alive Demands Something Of The Reader That The Ordinary Novel Reader Is Not Prepared To Give.

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

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

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?

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

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

A Tradition Without Intelligence Is Not Worth Having.

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.

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.

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

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.

I Say To You: Make Perfect Your Will. / I Say: Take No Thought Of The Harvest, / But Only Of Proper Sowing.

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

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

And Voices Singing Out Of Empty Cisterns And Exhausted Wells.

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

Winter Kept Us Warm, Covering Earth In Forgetful Snow

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.

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.

Where Is The Knowledge We Have Lost In Information?

Too Much Information

But The Church Cannot Be, In Any Political Sense, Either Conservative Or Liberal, Or Revolutionary. Conservatism Is Too Often Conservation Of The Wrong Things: Liberalism A Relaxation Of Discipline; Revolution A Denial Of The Permanent Things.

Amongst The Rock One Cannot Stop Or Think

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?

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

Disillusionment

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

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.

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

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.

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

Where Is The Life We Lost In Living?

Justice Itself Tends To Be Corrupted By Political Passion.

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

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

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.

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.

Upon The Glazen Shelves Kept Watch Matthew And Waldo, Guardians Of The Faith The Army Of Unalterable Law.

Although I Do Not Hope To Turn Again Although I Do Not Hope Although I Do Not Hope To Turn

I Said To My Soul, Be Still, And Let The Dark Come Upon You Which Shall Be The Darkness Of God. . . . So The Darkness Shall Be The Light, And The Stillness The Dancing.

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.

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.

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 Have All Our Private Terrors, Our Particular Shadows, Our Secret Fears. We Are Afraid In A Fear Which We Cannot Face, Which None Understands, And Our Hearts Are Torn From Us, Our Brains Unskinned Like The Layers Of An Onion, Ourselves The Last.

Home Is Where One Starts From.

Human Kind Cannot Bear Much Reality.

It Is Impossible To Design A System So Perfect That No One Needs To Be Good.

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

Playwriting Gets Into Your Blood And You Can't Stop It. At Least Not Until The Producers Or The Public Tell You To.

Humankind Cannot Bear Very Much Reality.

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.

A Condition Of Complete Simplicity (costing Not Less Than Everything)

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.

At The Violet Hour, When The Eyes And Back Turn Upward From The Desk, When The Human Engine Waits Like A Taxi Throbbing Waiting I Tiresias, Though Blind, Throbbing Between Two Lives.

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

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.

Shall I Part My Hair Behind? Do I Dare To Eat A Peach?

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

Between The Idea And The Reality Between The Motion And The Act Falls The Shadow For Thine Is The Kingdom Between The Conception And The Creation Between The Emotion And The Response Falls The Shadow Life Is Very Long Between The Desire And The Spasm Between The Potency And The Existence Between The Essence And The Descent Falls The Shadow For Thine Is The Kingdom For Thine Is Life Is For Thine Is The This Is The Way The World Ends This Is The Way The World Ends This Is The Way The World Ends Not With A Bang But A Whimper.

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

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.

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.

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.

Before A Cat Will Condescend To Treat You As A Trusted Friend, Some Little Token Of Esteem Is Needed, Like A Dish Of Cream; And You Might Now And Then Supply Some Caviare, Or Strassburg Pie, Some Potted Grouse, Or Salmon Paste — He's Sure To Have His Personal Taste. (i Know A Cat, Who Makes A Habit Of Eating Nothing Else But Rabbit, And When He's Finished, Licks His Paws So's Not To Waste The Onion Sauce.) A Cat's Entitled To Expect These Evidences Of Respect. And So In Time You Reach Your Aim, And Finally Call Him By His Name.

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

It's Harder To Confess The Sin That No One Believes In Than The Crime That Everyone Can Appreciate. For The Crime Is In Relation To The Law And The Sin Is In Relation To The Sinner.

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.

The End Of All Our Exploring Will Be To Arrive Where We Started.

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

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

A Play Should Give You Something To Think About. When I See A Play And Understand It The First Time, Then I Know It Can't Be Much Good.

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

The End Is Where We Start From.

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

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.

Teach Us To Care And Not To Care Teach Us To Sit Still. Pray For Us Sinners Now And At The Hour Of Our Death Pray For Us Now And At The Hour Of Our Death.

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.

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

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

I've Been Born, And Once Is Enough.

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

Sometimes Things Become Possible If We Want Them Bad Enough.

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!

With A Poem You Can Say 'i Got My Feeling Into Words For Myself. I Now Have The Equivalent In Words For That Much Of What I Have Felt.'

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

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

We Do Not Pass Twice Through The Same Door Or Return To The Door Through Which We Did Not Pass.

All Our Knowledge Brings Us Nearer To Our Ignorance.

Only Through Time Time Is Conquered

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

Here I Am, An Old Man In A Dry Month, Being Read To By A Boy, Waiting For Rain.

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.

The Historical Sense Compels A Man To Write Not Merely With His Own Generation In His Bones, But With A Feeling That The Whole Of Literature From Homer And Within It The Whole Of The Literature Of His Own Country Has A Simultaneous Existence And Composes A Simultaneous Order.

Where Does One Go From A World Of Insanity? Somewhere On The Other Side Of Despair.

The Work Of Creation Is Never Without Travail.

Where Is All The Knowledge We Lost With Information?

Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal.

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

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

But It Seems That Something Has Happened That Has Never Happened Before; Though We Know Not Just When, Or Why, Or How, Or Where. Men Have Left God Not For Gods, They Say, But For No Gods; And This Has Never Happened Before. That Men Both Deny Gods And Worship Gods, Professing First Reason, And The Money, And Power, And What They Call Life, Or Race, Or Dialect.the Church Disowned, The Tower Overthrown, The Bells Upturned, What Have We To Do But Stand With Empty Hands And Palms Upturned In An Age Which Advances Progressively Backwards?

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.

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

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

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

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.

Gin And Drugs, Dear Lady, Gin And Drugs.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Composing On The Typewriter, I Find That I Am Sloughing Off All My Long Sentences Which I Used To Dote Upon. Short, Staccato, Like Modern French Prose. The Typewriter Makes For Lucidity, But I Am Not Sure That It Encourages Subtlety.

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.

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.

There Will Be Time, There Will Be Time To Prepare A Face To Meet The Faces That You Meet.

The Nightingales Are Singing Near The Convent Of The Sacred Heart, And Sang Within The Bloody Wood When Agamemnon Cried Aloud, And Let Their Liquid Siftings Fall To Stain The Stiff Dishonored Shroud.

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

The Bad Poet Is Usually Unconscious Where He Ought To Be Conscious, And Conscious Where He Ought To Be Unconscious.

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?

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

In The Mountains, There You Feel Free.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Time Present And Time Past / Are Both Perhaps Present In Time Future.

People Find A Way In Which They Can Say Something.

Poetry Is Not A Turning Loose Of Emotion, But An Escape From Emotion.

Individual Talent

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

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.

Were Meant To Be

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

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.

We Must Believe That "emotion Recollected In Tranquillity" Is An Inexact Formula. For It Is Neither Emotion, Nor Recollection, Nor Without Distortion Of Meaning, Tranquillity. It Is A Concentration, And A New Thing Resulting From The Concentration Of A Very Great Number Of Experiences Which To The Practical And Active Person Would Not Seem To Be Experiences At All; It Is A Concentration Which Does Not Happen Consciously Or Of Deliberation. These Experiences Are Not "recollected" And They Finally Unite In An Atmosphere Which Is "tranquil" Only In That It Is A Passive Attending Upon The Event.

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.

Each Way Means Loneliness -- And Communion.

Taking The Question In General, I Should Say, In The Case Of Many Poets, That The Most Important Thing For Them To Do ... Is To Write As Little As Possible

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

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

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

It Is Obvious That We Can No More Explain A Passion To A Person Who Has Never Experienced It Than We Can Explain Light To The Blind.

We Had The Experience, But We Missed The Meaning.

In Life There Is Not Time To Grieve Long.

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

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

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.

All Cases Are Unique And Very Similar To Others.

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.

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.

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.

Humor Is Also A Way Of Saying Something Serious.

All Time Is Unreedemable.

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

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