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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.

-T. S. Eliot

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Trying To Use Words,

T. S. Eliot

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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.

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Teach Us To Care And Not To Care

Genuine Poetry Can Communicate Before It Is Understood.

To Believe In The Supernatural Is Not Simply To Believe That After Living A Successful, Material, And Fairly Virtuous Life Here One Will Continue To Exist In The Best-possible Substitute For This World, Or That After Living A Starved And Stunted Life Here One Will Be Compensated With All The Good Things One Has Gone Without: It Is To Believe That The Supernatural Is The Greatest Reality Here And Now.

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

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.

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

The Dream Crossed Twilight Between Birth And Dying.

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

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 Single Rose Is Now The Garden Where All Loves End

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

This Is The Feeling For Syllable And Rhythm, Penetrating Far Below The Conscious Levels Of Thought And Feeling, Invigorating Every Word.

It Is Impossible To Say Just What I Mean!

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.

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.

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.

The Circle Of Our Understanding Is A Very Restricted Area.

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.

Lady Of Silences Calm And Distressed Torn And Most Whole Rose Of Memory Rose Of Forgetfulness Exhausted And Life-giving Worried Reposeful The Single Rose Is Now The Garden Where All Loves End Terminate Torment Of Love Unsatisfied The Greater Torment Of Love Satisfied End Of The Endless Journey To No End Conclusion Of All That Is Inconclusible Speech Without Word And Word Of No Speech Grace To The Mother For The Garden Where All Love Ends.

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

Before A Cat Will Condescend To Treat You As A Trusted Friend, Some Little Token Of Esteem Is Needed, Like A Dish Of Cream.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Men Tighten The Knot Of Confusion Into Perfect Misunderstanding.

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.

We Read Many Books, Because We Cannot Know Enough People.

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

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

Disillusionment

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

Those Who Say They Give The Public What It Wants Begin By Underestimating Public Taste And End By Debauching It.

Should I, After Tea And Cakes And Ices, Have The Strength To Force The Moment To Its Crisis?

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

In The End Is My Beginning.

You Are The Music While The Music Lasts.

At The Still Point, There The Dance Is.

In Life There Is Not Time To Grieve Long.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

If You Will Not Have God (and He Is A Jealous God), You Should Pay Your Respects To Hitler Or Stalin.

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.

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

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!

When Lovely Woman Stoops To Folly And Paces About Her Room Again, Alone, She Smooths Her Hair With Automatic Hand, And Puts A Record On The Gramophone.

We Should Not Confuse Information With Knowledge.

Time Past And Time Future What Might Have Been And What Has Been Point To One End, Which Is Always Present.

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.

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

Friendship Should Be More Than Biting Time Can Sever.

Lost Friendship

Talent Imitates, Genius Steals.

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

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.

Most Of The Trouble In The World Is Caused By People Wanting To Be Important.

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.

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

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

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?

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

The Purpose Of Literature Is To Turn Blood Into Ink.

The Rum Tum Tugger Is A Curious Cat: If You Offer Him Pheasant He Would Rather Have Grouse. If You Put Him In A House He Would Much Prefer A Flat, If You Put Him In A Flat Then He'd Rather Have A House. If You Set Him On A Mouse Then He Only Wants A Rat, If You Set Him On A Rat Then He'd Rather Chase A Mouse. Yes The Rum Tum Tugger Is A Curious Cat - And There Isn't Any Call For Me To Shout It: For He Will Do As He Do Do And There's No Doing Anything About It!

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

A Tradition Without Intelligence Is Not Worth Having.

The Very Existence Of Libraries Affords The Best Evidence That We May Yet Have Hope For The Future Of Man

Liberty Is A Different Kind Of Pain From Prison.

And Right Action Is Freedom From Past And Future Also.

Humankind Can't Stand Too Much Reality.

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.

…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.

The End Is Where We Start From.

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

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

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.

I Gotta Use Words To Talk To You.

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

Light Light The Visible Reminder Of Invisible Light.

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

Sensibility Alters From Generation To Generation In Everybody, Whether We Will Or No; But Expression Is Only Altered By A Man Of Genius.

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

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.

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

The Wounded Surgeon Plies The Steel That Questions The Distempered Part; Beneath The Bleeding Hands We Feel The Sharp Compassion Of The Healer's Art Resolving The Enigma Of The Fever Chart.

We Die To Each Other Daily. What We Know Of Other People Is Only Our Memory Of The Moments During Which We Knew Them. And They Have Changed Since Then. To Pretend That They And We Are The Same Is A Useful And Convenient Social Convention Which Must Sometimes Be Broken. We Must Also Remember That At Every Meeting We Are Meeting A Stranger.

One Thing You Cannot Know: The Sudden Extinction Of Every Alternative, The Unexpected Crash Of The Iron Cataract. You Do Not Know What Hope Is, Until You Have Lost It. You Only Know What It Is Not To Hope: You Do Not Know What It Is To Have Hope Taken From You Or To Fling It Away, To Join The Legion Of The Hopeless Unrecognized By Other Men, Though Sometimes By Each Other.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

If We Really Want To Pray We Must First Learn To Listen, For In The Silence Of The Heart God Speaks.

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.

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.

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

We Took Up Our Positions, In Obedience To Instructions.

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

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

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.

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.

There Is No Method But To Be Very Intelligent.

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.

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

Men Live By Forgetting And Woman Live On Memories.

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

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.

Between The Vision And The Act Lies The Shadow.

In The Mountains, There You Feel Free.

The Journey, Not The Destination Matters.

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.

Oh, Do Not Ask, 'what Is It?'/let Us Go And Make Our Visit.

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

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.

All Time Is Eternal, Moving Inexorably Toward An End Which We Believe Is A Result Of Our Actions, But Over Which Our Control Is Mere Illusion.

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.

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.

Art Is The Escape From Personality.

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

Now That The Lilacs Are In Bloom She Has A Bowl Of Lilacs In Her Room

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.

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

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

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.

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.

That Is The Worst Moment, When You Feel You Have Lost / The Desires For All That Was Most Desirable, / Before You Are Contented With What You Can Desire; / Before You Know What Is Left To Be Desired; / And You Go On Wishing That You Could Desire / What Desire Has Left Behind.

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.

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?

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.

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

Philosophy: A Purple Bullfinch In A Lilac Tree.

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

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

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

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.

Where Is All The Knowledge We Lost With Information?

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

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.

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

And Voices Singing Out Of Empty Cisterns And Exhausted Wells.

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.

So The Lover Must Struggle For Words.

The Darkness Declares The Glory Of Light.

Old Men Ought To Be Explorers.

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.

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

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

It Takes So Many Years To Learn That One Is Dead.

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

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

I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Dust.

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

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

April Is The Cruellest Month.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Weave, Weave The Sunlight In Your Hair-

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.

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.

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.

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.

...the Still Point In A Turning World.

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

A Philosophy Can And Must Be Worked Out With The Greatest Rigour And Discipline In The Details, But Can Ultimately Be Founded On Nothing But Faith: And This Is The Reason, I Suspect, Why The Novelties In Philosophy Are Only In Elaboration, And Never In Fundamentals.

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

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

If You Aren't In Over Your Head, How Do You Know How Tall You Are?

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.

If You Haven’t The Strength To Impose Your Own Terms Upon Life, Then You Must Accept The Terms It Offers You.

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

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.

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

The Past And Future / Are Conquered, And Reconciled.

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Hubert Selby, Jr.

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