T.S. Eliot
Landscape is a passive creature which lends itself to an author's mood
T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, in After Strange Gods, 1934
The
taste of an adolescent writer is intense but narrow: it is determined by
personal needs
T.S.
Eliot, Yeats 1940
If
he walked in city streets / He seemed to tread on faces, convulsive thighs and
knees
T.S.
Eliot The Death of Saint Narcissus
Now
he is green, dry and stained / With the shadow in his mouth
T.S.
Eliot The Death of Saint Narcissus
Memory
and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain
T.S.
Eliot The Waste Land, 1922
What
are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stoney rubbish?
T.S.
Eliot The Waste Land, 1922
I will
show you fear in a handful of dust
T.S.
Eliot The Waste Land, 1922
There
is the empty chapel, only the wind's home
T.S.
Eliot The Waste Land, 1922
These
fragments I have shored against my ruins
T.S.
Eliot The Waste Land, 1922
I
rejoice, having to construct something / upon which to rejoice
T.S.
Eliot, Ash Wednesday, 1930
This
is the land which ye / Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
matters.
T.S.
Eliot, Ash Wednesday, 1930
No
time to rejoice for those who walk among the noise…
T.S.
Eliot, Ash Wednesday, 1930
I
Journeyed to London, to the timekept City,
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
In
the city we need no bells, let them waken the suburbs
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
The
good man is the builder, if he build what is good
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
In
the vacant places / We will build with new brick
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
If
men do not build / How shall they live?
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
In
this street / There is no beginning, no movement, no peace and no end / But
noise without speech.
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
We
would build the the beginning and the end of this street. We build the meaning.
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
Of all
that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten or ripe.
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
A
thousand policemen directing the traffic / Cannot tell you why you come or
where you go
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
Shall
we lift up our feet among perpetual ruins?
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
Where
there is no temple there shall be no homes
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
When
the Stranger says: 'What is the meaning of this city? / Do you huddle close
together because you love each other?' What will you answer? 'We all dwell
together / To Make money of each other'? Or 'This is a community'?
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
Be
prepared for him who knows how to ask questions
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
And
he grieved for the borken city
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
So
they built as men must build / With the sword in one hand and the trowel in the
other
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
Those
who sit in a house of which the use is forgotten
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
We
must go between empty walls…
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
The
soul of man must quicken to creation. / Out of the formless stone, when the
artist unites himself with stone, / Spring always new froms of life, from the
soul of man that is joined to the soul of stone; / Out of the meaningless
practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless / Joined with the artist's
eye, new life, new form, new colour. / Out of the sea of sound the life of
music, / Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal
imprecisions, / Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken
the place of thoughts and feelings, / There spring the perfect order of speech,
and the beuty of incantation.
T.S.
Eliot, Choruses from 'The Rock', 1934
Time
present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time
future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is
unredeemable
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
What
might have been is an abstraction
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
What
might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Other
echoes inhabit the garden
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Human
kind cannot bear very much reality
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
I
can only say there we have been: but I cannot say where.
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
The
inner freedom from the practical desire
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
the
enchainment of past and future / Woven in the the weakess of the changing body
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
To
be conscious is not to be in time / But only in time can the moment […] be
remembered. […] Only through time is time conquered
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Investing
form with lucid stillness / Turning shadow into transient beauty / With slow
rotation suggesting permanence
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Words
strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the Burden, / Under the tension,
slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
The detail
of the pattern is movement
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Desire
itself is movement […] Loce is itself unmoving / Only the cause and end of
movement, / Timeless, and undesiring / Except in the aspect of time / Caught in
the form of limitation / Between un-being and Being
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
The
deep lane insists on the direction
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
every
moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have been
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
The
houses are all gone under the sea
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Trying
to learn 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, / Undisciplined squads of emotion
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Home
is where one starts from
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Love
is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
I do
not know much about gods; but I think that the river / Is a strong brown god -
sullen, untamed and intractable, / Patient to some degree, at first recognised
as a frontier; useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commmerce; then only a
problem confronting the builder of Bridges. / The problem once solved, the
brown god is almost forgotten / By the dwellers in cities [...] Unhonoured,
unpropitiated / By worshippers of the machine
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
We
cannot think of a time that is oceanless
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
superficial
notions of evolution, / Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of
disowning the past.
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
We had
the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores
the experience / In a different form
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
The
past experience revived in the meaning / is not the experience of one life only
/ but of many generations
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
The
backward look behind the assurance of recorded history, the backward half-look
/ Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
The
future is a faded song
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Observe
disease in signatures
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Men's
curiosity searches past and future / And clings to that dimension
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
right
action is freedom from past and future
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
[We]
Who are only undefeated / Because we have gone on trying
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Dust
in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended. / Dust inbreathed
was a house
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
The
end is where we start from
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
A
people without history / Is not redeeemed from time, for history is a pattern /
Of timeless moments
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
History
is now and England
T.S.
Eliot, Four Quartets, 1935-1942
Signs
are taken for wonders
T.S.
Eliot, Poems, 1920
History
has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with
whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities. Think now / She gives when our
attention is distracted / And what she gives, gives with such supple
confusions / That the giving famishes teh craving. Gives too late / What's not
believed in, or if still believed, / In memory only, reconsidered passion.
Gives too soon / into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with / Till
the refusal propagates a fear. Think / Neither fear nor courage saves us.
Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Vitures / Are forced upon us by
our impudent crimes.
T.S.
Eliot, Poems, 1920
The
lengthened shadow of a man / Is history, said Emerson
T.S.
Eliot, Poems, 1920
Webster
was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin; […] He knew
that thought clings round dead limbs / Tightening its lusts and luxuries […]
Our lot crawls between dry ribs / To keep our metaphysics warm.
T.S.
Eliot, Poems, 1920
Streets
that follow like a tedious argument
T.S.
Eliot, Prufrock, 1917
You
had such a vision of the street/ As the street hardly understands
T.S.
Eliot, Prufrock, 1917
The
conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the world
T.S.
Eliot, Prufrock, 1917
The
worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots
T.S.
Eliot, Prufrock, 1917
Twelve
o'clock. / Along the street / Held in a lunar synthesis, / Whispering lunar
incantations / Dissolve the floors of memory / And all its clear relations, /
Its divisions and precisions. / Every Street lamp that I pass / Beats like a
fatalistic drum, / And throught he spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the
memory / As a madman shakes the dead geranium.
T.S.
Eliot, Prufrock, 1917
Rust
that clings to the form that strength has left
T.S.
Eliot, Prufrock, 1917
And
along the trampled edges of the street / I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
T.S.
Eliot, Prufrock, 1917
If
the street were time and he at the end of the street
T.S.
Eliot, Prufrock, 1917
Tradition
involves the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone
who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year
T.S.
Eliot. Tradition and the individual talent in After Strange Gods, 1919
the
historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past,
but of its presence
T.S.
Eliot. Tradition and the individual talent in After Strange Gods, 1919
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
T.S.
Eliot. Tradition and the individual talent After Strange Gods, 1919
This
historical sense which is a sense of the timeless and of the temporal and of
the timeless and 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 own contemporaneity.
T.S.
Eliot. Tradition and the individual talent After Strange Gods, 1919
No
poet no artist has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his
appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead
T.S.
Eliot. Tradition and the individual talent After Strange Gods, 1919
what
happens when when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing
monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (…) The existing order is complete before the new work
arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole
existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered and so the relations,
proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted
T.S.
Eliot. Tradition and the individual talent in After Strange Gods, 1919
The
past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the
past
T.S.
Eliot. Tradition and the individual talent in After Strange Gods, 1919 (slight
grammatical rephrase)
Art
never improves, but […] the material of art is never quite the same
T.S.
Eliot. Tradition and the individual talent After Strange Gods, 1919 (slight
grammatical rephrase)
What
I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actionas, habits, and customs,
from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a
stranger which represent the blood kinship of 'the same people living in the
same place'
T.S.
Eliot. Traditions in After Strange Gods, 1934
We
are always in danger, in clinging to an old tradition, or attempting to
re-establish one, of confusing the vital and the unessential, the real and the
sentimental.
T.S.
Eliot. Traditions in After Strange Gods, 1934
Our
(…) danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as
something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition
which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead
of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time
T.S.
Eliot. Traditions in After Strange Gods, 1934
It
is not of advantage to us to indulge a sentimental attitude towards the past.
For one thing, in even the very best living tradition there is always a mixture
of good and bad, and much that deserves criticism; and for antoher, traditon is
not a matter of feeling alone
T.S.
Eliot. Traditions in After Strange Gods, 1934
tradition
without intelligence is not worth having
T.S.
Eliot. Traditions in After Strange Gods, 1934
What
we can do is to use our minds (…) to discover what is the best life for us not
as a political abstraction, but as a particular people in a particular place;
what in the past is worth preserving and what should be rejected; and what
conditions, within our power to bring about, would foster the society that we
desire
T.S.
Eliot. Traditions in After Strange Gods, 1934