Top 100 Quotes About Eliot
#1. My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.
Jacob Rothschild
#2. Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
Robert Morgan
#3. Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.
Gore Vidal
#4. Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions. There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
- T. S. Eliot
Harlan Coben
#5. Remember that it is 'free-thinking Jews,' not Jews as such, who are defined as the undesirables by T.S. Eliot in After Strange Gods.
Christopher Hitchens
#6. Each day a raid on the inarticulate--T.S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
#7. There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." - T. S. Eliot, from "East Coker
Kristin Hannah
#8. T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#9. So it's okay to kill if your intentions are pure?" "Hasn't that always been the case?" Eliot takes a swig of his beer and flops back on the sofa. "Revenge. Capital punishment. Euthanasia. War.
Judd Trichter
#11. Whoever that hermit was, he obviously despised his fellow man, and that meant he was OK in Eliot's book.
Lev Grossman
#12. Praise be to Nero's Neptune The Titanic sails at dawn And everybody's shouting "Which Side Are You On?" And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot Fighting in the captain's tower While calypso singers laugh at them And fishermen hold flowers.
Bob Dylan
#13. He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)
Jeanette Winterson
#14. England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others ... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens ... I adopted them passionately.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#15. Eliot, I love you like the brother I never had or wanted,
Lev Grossman
#16. She's one you *really* care about, isn't she?"
Eliot shook his head. "How can you read other people so well, and completely misread me?"
Frowning, Sophie asked, "What do you mean?"
Looking right into her eyes, Eliot said, "I care about *all* of them.
Keith R.A. DeCandido
#17. Wait a minute," Quentin said. "Who or what is the Thames dragon?" "The Thames dragon," Eliot said. "You know. The dragon who lives in the Thames.
Lev Grossman
#18. He regarded Huginn as only slightly more dangerous than most pets, in that he understood why people had pets but harbored the paranoia they would one day eat their owners. True, it kept Eliot from even having a pet larger than his fist, but it also kept him from being kibble.
Thomm Quackenbush
#19. When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
Howard Nemerov
#20. (Eliot's letters to her will continue sealed until 2019, and we have reason to believe he destroyed hers to him
J.C. Woods
#21. 'Your brain doesn't process language quite like other people. Why that is, I have no idea.'
'I have a superior brain?'
'Uh,' Eliot said, 'I wouldn't go that far.'
Max Barry
#22. The angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone. - George Eliot
Ann Brashares
#23. It's true," Eliot said. "Statistically, historically, and however else you want to look at it, you are almost never right. A monkey making life decisions based on its horoscope in USA Today would be right more often than you. But in this case, yes, you were right. Don't spoil it.
Lev Grossman
#24. They pulled Ezra through the streets in a wooden cage. Blake was sure of God. Villon was a mugger. Lorca sucked cock. T. S. Eliot worked a teller's cage
Charles Bukowski
#25. All my brother Eliot and I did as kids was film sketches.
Ilana Glazer
#26. Moyers: {TS] Eliot speaks about the still point of the turning world, where motion and stasis are together, the hub where the movement of time and the stillness of eternity are together.
Joseph Campbell
#27. The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.
Jonah Lehrer
#28. The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
John Updike
#29. Eliot isn't like anyone I know. He's just Eliot. And even if he isn't refined, he knows how to live. That's why I'm not about to let him die.
K.E. Ormsbee
#30. They spent the rest of that afternoon together. Maybe he felt guilty for giving Quentin the cigarette, or maybe Eliot had decided that the tedium of solitude was ever so slightly greater than the tedium of Quentin's company. Maybe he just needed a straight man. He
Lev Grossman
#31. T. S. Eliot told Auden tht the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead.
Howard Jacobson
#32. What is that *smell*?"
Eliot shook his head. "I keep telling you, it's fresh air.
Keith R.A. DeCandido
#33. T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind.
Mary Jo Bang
#34. Eliot always said, "I'm sorry. I had to do that." If you are all right really, really all right, you don't do things that are sorry.
Rumer Godden
#35. At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.
Michel Faber
#36. She felt that "truthful" and "honest" were two very different concepts. She could truthfully say that she hadn't eaten Roselyn's Chinese leftovers, but that wasn't honest because it omitted that Eliot did and that Shane did not object.
Thomm Quackenbush
#37. I'm also a book nerd so aside from my life and my opinions, you could say my lyrics are inspired in some sense by the writings of Guy Debord, John Berryman, Georges Bataille, T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Bukowski, Artaud, Derrick Jensen and bunch of other people.
Dominic Owen Mallary
#38. Well,' Lydia said, 'I guess Armageddon's back on.'
Eliot fought back a grin.
'You're smiling?', Lydia said. She looked at her car and at their house and down the empty street. 'That's totally inappropriate.
D.L.E. Roger
#39. Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.
Billy Collins
#40. He's so happy," Eliot said dryly. "It's like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.
Lev Grossman
#41. Is T.S. Eliot the only poet one can think of who could have spent a year on his own in Paris at twenty-three - and managed to have no sexual encounter whatsoever?
David Markson
#42. It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes," [T.S. Eliot] wrote, "who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.
Ross Wetzsteon
#43. 'You can't stop me. Your word voodoo, it doesn't work on me. Right? So how do you think you're going to-'
Eliot produced a pistol. He didn't seem to pull it from anywhere. He just suddenly had it.
Wil's eyes stung.
'See?' Eliot put away the gun. 'There are all kinds of persuasion.'
Max Barry
#44. When you write a song it's sometimes in a desperate moment whn you can't really articulate it. What I love about lyrics is what T.S. Eliot said: 'Good poetry is felt before it is heard.' I'm a believer in that. It's those moments when you sit yourself down, and talk to yourself in the mirror.
Marcus Mumford
#45. Always in England if you had the type of brain that was capable of understanding T.S. Eliot's poetry or Kant's logic, you could be sure of finding large numbers of people who would hate you violently.
D.J. Taylor
#46. Most people think that George Nelson, Charles Eames and Eliot Noyes invented industrial design. That is, of course, an exaggeration. George did it without any assistance from the other two.
Bill N. Lacy
#47. T.S. Eliot, who learned to swim at the same beach as I did, just threw in the towel and moved to Cheyne Walk. I'm not going to do that but I'm not scared of the open channel between me and Britain.
William Monahan
#49. It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.
Katy Lederer
#50. The tragedy of Eliot Spitzer is almost Greek: Ascendant son of wealth and privilege dedicates his life to social justice, warns of the corruption lurking among us, and falls victim to his inner demons at the very moment of vindication.
Wil S. Hylton
#51. For a long time Eliot had had the theory that in Janet's mind everybody was as judgmental of her as she was of them, and if that was true then the world must be a pretty scary place for her.
Lev Grossman
#52. If you think this life is all there is," he said, "then self-sacrifice must seem to you sheer insanity. If you do not think so then it is only common sense. It all depends on your point of view." (Hilary Eliot to David Eliot, Chapter 9)
Elizabeth Goudge
#53. George Eliot has the heart of Sappho; but the face, with the long proboscis, the protruding teeth of the Apocalyptic horse, betrayed animality.
George Meredith
#54. It's never too late to be the person you might have been. ~George Eliot
A.J. Warner
#56. Dude is that was a Shakespeare quote duel, he just kicked your ass. Oberon
I know, but I slipped in some T.S.Eliot and he didn't even catch it. Hopefully next time I wont be recovering from an assassination attempt, and then I'll do better. - Atticus
Kevin Hearne
#57. So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.
Philip Kitcher
#58. The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action.
Russell Kirk
#59. Every writer owes something to Holmes.
T.S. Eliot, in The Criterion, 1929
T. S. Eliot
#60. Put on a face to meet the faces that you meet - T S Eliot - used in The Book Of Peach
T. S. Eliot
#61. We are, now, just as valuable, intelligent, and real as Eliot or any of his contemporaries. Our ideas and experiences are just as sound and true. Our passion to save our world from what we see it becoming is just as authentic. We are always the Lost Generation, but with different accoutrements.
Nate Ragolia
#62. I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.
Julia Glass
#63. If I get one more person telling me I look like Eliot Spitzer, I'm just going to have to play the guy one day.
Michael Kelly
#64. We hunt the White Stag, like Quentin did. We catch it or shoot it or whatever you do with it. We get three wishes. We wish Fillory would last forever and not die. Done. Mischief managed." Eliot
Lev Grossman
#65. Needle in a haystack's easy - just bring a magnet."
Eliot stared witheringly at Hardison. "You take the poetry out of everything."
"Says the man who'd just punch the haystack.
Keith R.A. DeCandido
#66. I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.
George Eliot
#67. I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
Howard Nemerov
#68. I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit," Eliot said. "Though that would explain a lot.
Lev Grossman
#69. I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
A.E. Housman
#70. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened. - T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton
Blake Crouch
#71. Eliot had only one pair of shoes, black ones. They had a crackle finish as a result of an experiment. Eliot once tried to polish them with Johnson's Glo-Coat, which was a floorwax, not intended for shoes.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#72. One of the many things I said was that Eliot Spitzer had one set of rules for himself and one set for everyone else. I never would have imagined it could be so glaring.
John Faso
#73. Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Eliot's character; vanity of person and of situation.
Jane Austen
#74. I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
Marguerite Young
#75. It's a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous.
Mona Simpson
#76. Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.
Bob Dylan
#77. The fundamental message is self-righteous, and it takes this form: 'T. S. Eliot is a homophobe and I am not. Therefore, I am a better person than Eliot.' To which the proper response is: 'But T. S. Eliot could really write, and you can't.
Ken Wilber
#78. What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.
Jenny Offill
#79. There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#80. Amandine Bisset was so passionate for Eliot Walker that tiny silver sparks flew from her fingertips when she touched him. When they made love her whole body filled with white light so bright Amandine believed she might explode.
Menna Van Praag
#81. We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
Virginia Woolf
#82. Both T.S. Eliot and I like to play, but I like to play euchre, while he likes to play Eucharist.
Robert Frost
#83. We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.
Christopher Hitchens
#84. Let me introduce you. Sophie, this is Miss Eliot, from the National Childcare Agency. Miss Eliot, this is Sophie, from the ocean.
Katherine Rundell
#85. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.
Kurt Vonnegut
#86. Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember ...
Elif Shafak
#87. When then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued me in 2003 over my stewardship as a director of the New York Stock Exchange, the NYSE's legal expenses were more than $100 million, which made it perhaps the priciest litigation in the state's history.
Kenneth Langone
#88. As I grew up I developed some literary pretensions myself, and studied and wrote meticulous poetry informed by poets as diverse as T. S. Eliot, Rimbaud, and Judy Grahn.
Jo Weldon
#89. . . .poetry by Eliot. There's a lulling thing in his voice that makes me feel as if a spell has been cast that shall wake us all so that we might fly out of the mirror and speak to each other clearly at last.
Louisa Hall
#90. Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.
Clive James
#91. I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.
Gabrielle Aplin
#92. George Eliot is my only steady girlfriend. We go to bed together every night.
Peter O'Toole
#93. I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about.
Marcus Mumford
#94. The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment.
Cynthia Ozick
#95. What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up.
Alanis Morissette
#96. Between the emotion and the response falls the shadow, T.S. Eliot said,
Niall Williams
#97. What if more of life could be like that? Like the last slow dance, where, to echo T.S. Eliot, a lifetime burns in every moment.
Alice Steinbach
#98. Plus, if we invited Luna, we'd have to invite Jane's two brothers, Eliot Cobalt and Tom Cobalt. Which would probably end with me calling the fire department or our on-call doctor.
Becca Ritchie
#99. I would like to work with Paul McCartney in the future. Or Brian Seltzer. But I guess like, like I said - I'm into The Strokes, like Ben Folds, Eliot Smith, the Beatles are my favorite, the Beach Boys, Queen.
Drake Bell
#100. Someone once accused me of being like Eliot Ness. I sad no sir, I'm not E.N., but I can promise you that I'm not Al Capone!
Robert Stack
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