T.S. Eliot: Trending quotes

Variant: The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Source: The Waste Land (1922)

Source: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

Letter to his godson, Thomas Erle Faber (January 1931) as quoted in &quot;T.S. Eliot&#x27;s Private Letters To Faber Publishing Family To Be Sold&quot; at World Collector&#x27;s Net http://www.worldcollectorsnet.com/news/newstories/news736.html (12 August 2005) <br class="br">Source: Four Quartets <br class="br">Context: I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat. My Cat is a Lilliecat Hubvously. What a lilliecat it is. There never was such a Lilliecat. Its Name is JELLYORUM and its one Idea is to be Usefull!!

Source: Four Quartets

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
Source: Four Quartets
Context: The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; 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 the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Source: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems
Context: It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while If one, settling a
Pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

Source: Four Quartets

Source: The Waste Land

Variant: The journey not the arrival matters.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Source: Selected Poems