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Age
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The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always asked to do things, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Authors & Writing
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A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, "New York Post", September 22, 1963
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Dance, Dancing
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I said to my soul
Be still
And wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing
And wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing
There is yet faith
But the faith and the hope and the love
Are all in the waiting
And do not think
For you are not ready for thought
So the darkness shall be the light
And the stillness
The dancing
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Four Quartets
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Discovery
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, "Little Gidding" (from the last of his Four Quartets)
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Endings
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"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."
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, "Four Quartets"
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Fear
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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,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Excerpted from: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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Guilt
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In the small circle of pain within the skull
You still shall tramp and tread one endless round
Of thought, to justify your action to yourselves,
Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave,
Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe
Which never is belief: this is your fate on earth
And we must think no further of you.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, pt. 2 (1935)
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Journeys
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"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, (widely attributed to Emerson, possibly 'anonymous')
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Literary
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"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Hollow Men, The
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Love
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Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, "Four Quartets"
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Poetry
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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 from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Philip Massinger (essay)
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What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the relation of criticism to poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1933, 1959), 130
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Reality
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Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, from "Burnt Norton" (No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')
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Seasons
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"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory out of desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in a forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers."
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, Waste Land, The
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Television
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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.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Tyranny
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Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Books by and about TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
