T. S. Eliot citations

Page 4

“Humor is also a way of saying something serious.”

“I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

“music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but
you are the music
While the music lasts.”

“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”

“I can connect
Nothing with nothing”

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

“We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.”

“For you know only a heap of broken images”

“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.”

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

“This love is silent.”

“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.”

“In my end is my beginning.”

“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.”

“It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.”

“Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.”

“Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance”

“People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.”

“Footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage we did not take
towards the door we never opened
into the rose garden. My words echo
thus, in your mind”

“I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.”

“Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it”

“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.”

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;”

“This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.”

“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.”

“Where is the Life we lost in living?”

“He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.”

“There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent.”

“time past and time future
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present.”