Top 100 Quotes About T S Eliot
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Both T.S. Eliot and I like to play, but I like to play euchre, while he likes to play Eucharist.
Robert Frost
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.
Paul Muldoon
#11. T. S. Eliot that say And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And to know the place for the first time. L
John O'Donohue
#12. T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," and Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. I
Robin Rinaldi
#13. As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.
Ian McEwan
#14. I don't know if I call myself a poet or not. I would like to, but I'm not really qualified to make that decision, because I come in on such a back door, that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a [John] Keats or a T.S. Eliot would really think of my stuff.
Bob Dylan
#15. I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.' That's T.S. Eliot, in case you were wondering. An oldie but a goodie. When it came to existential exhaustion, the man was one smart cookie.
Justin Cronin
#16. T.S. Eliot was one of the first poets introduced to me when I started studying literature and has felt like a close friend ever since. No one nails urban despair quite like Eliot.
Penelope Mitchell
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Between the emotion and the response falls the shadow, T.S. Eliot said,
Niall Williams
#20. 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
#21. Put on a face to meet the faces that you meet - T S Eliot - used in The Book Of Peach
T. S. Eliot
#22. Every writer owes something to Holmes.
T.S. Eliot, in The Criterion, 1929
T. S. Eliot
#23. 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
#24. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY.
Billy Collins
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.
Jonah Lehrer
#37. 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
#38. When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
Howard Nemerov
#39. He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)
Jeanette Winterson
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. Each day a raid on the inarticulate--T.S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
T. S. Eliot
#47. The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence
can never retract.
by this, and only this, we have existed.
T. S. Eliot
#48. We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds, ... for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.
T. S. Eliot
#49. The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.
T. S. Eliot
#50. Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.
T. S. Eliot
#51. Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
T. S. Eliot
#52. When war is not just it is subsequently justified; so it becomes
many things. In reality, an unjust war is merely piracy.
It consists of piracy, ego and, more than anything, money.
War is our century's prostitution.
T. S. Eliot
#53. It takes so many years to learn that one is dead.
T. S. Eliot
#54. I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.
T. S. Eliot
#55. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot
#56. Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.
T. S. Eliot
#57. Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.
T. S. Eliot
#58. I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
T. S. Eliot
#59. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
T. S. Eliot
#60. I'm living in fiction. It's perfectly okay to be in love with any and all fictional boyfriends, even if they aren't yours.
Anne Eliot
#61. Many people give the appearance of progress by shedding the prejudices and irrational postulates of one generation only to acquire those of the next.
T. S. Eliot
#62. Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.
T. S. Eliot
#63. He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.
T. S. Eliot
#64. He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon.
T. S. Eliot
#65. Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.
T. S. Eliot
#66. We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.
T. S. Eliot
#67. When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.
T. S. Eliot
#68. Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.
T. S. Eliot
#69. Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.
T. S. Eliot
#70. I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.
George Eliot
#71. There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.
T. S. Eliot
#72. For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
T. S. Eliot
#74. It is just the literature that we read for 'amusement' or 'purely for pleasure' that may have the greatest, least suspected, earliest influence on us.
T. S. Eliot
#75. Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.
T. S. Eliot
#76. And right action is freedom from past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. The Dry Salvages
T. S. Eliot
#77. The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.
T. S. Eliot
#78. For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
T. S. Eliot
#79. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment.
T. S. Eliot
#81. My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
T. S. Eliot
#82. No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice
T. S. Eliot
#83. I could see nothing behind that child's eye. 40
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
T. S. Eliot
#84. It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
T. S. Eliot
#85. It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
T. S. Eliot
#86. We do not pass through the same door twice Or return to the door through which we did not pass
T. S. Eliot
#87. 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.
T. S. Eliot
#88. You will have to live with those memories and make them into something new. Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.
T. S. Eliot
#89. There will be time to murder and create.
T. S. Eliot
#90. Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.
T. S. Eliot
#91. Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot
#92. There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
T. S. Eliot
#93. I can show you fear in a handful of dust
T. S. Eliot
#94. Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
T. S. Eliot
#95. When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.
T. S. Eliot
#96. Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader ... .
T. S. Eliot
#97. Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
T. S. Eliot
#98. This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot
#99. Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
T. S. Eliot
#100. We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.
T. S. Eliot
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