“I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 39 et seq.
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T.S. Eliot 270
20th century English author 1888–1965Related quotes

“I am nothing, neither a chief nor a soldier.”
Recorded by a reporter after Sitting Bull's retreat to Canada after being defeated in the Black Hills War, originally published in the New York Herald on November 16, 1877. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 190.
“Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright,
But looked to near have neither heat nor light.”
Act IV, scene ii.
Duchess of Malfi (1623)

178c, M. Joyce, trans, Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961), p. 533
The Symposium

The Frozen Ship, from The London Literary Gazette, (16th September 1826) - Metrical Fragment No. V. - The Frozen Ship, under the pen name 'Iole'
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

“I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever.”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality
Context: Glorious is the risk! — καλος γαρ ο κινδυνος, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying … Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression on me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die — no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live — this poor "I" that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.

“Neither alive nor dead; no one lets up, no one wins.”
”Beast,” p. 72
Circling: 1978-1987 (1993), Sequence: “Darkness Is Waiting”

“my hands dead
my heart dead
silence
adagio of rocks
the world ablaze
that's the best
for me.”
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell