Quotes from T.S. Eliot

You are here to kneel.

Dust in the air suspended, Marks the place where a story ended.

I am no prophet—and here's no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker

I was neither living nor dead, and I knew nothing

I grow old...I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk along the beach. I have the heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to me.

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

It is the just man who Like a bold lion, should be without fear.

We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning

I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed' und leer das Meer.

We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union / (...) / In my end is my beginning.

One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.

Many people give the appearance of progress by shedding the prejudices and irrational postulates of one generation only to acquire those of the next.

Let me be no nearer In death's dream kingdom Let me also wear Such deliberate disguises Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves In a field Behaving as the wind behaves No nearer — Not that final meeting In the twilight kingdom

There are certain points I do not yet understand: They will be clear later. I am also convinced That you only hold a fragment of the explanation. It is only because of what you do not understand That you feel the need to declare what you do. There is more to understand: hold fast to that As the way to freedom.

Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.

Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death.

As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised As the mind deserts the body it has used. I should find Some way incomparably light and deft, Some way we both should understand, Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel History is now and England.

Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader….

And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

A restless shivering painted shadow In life, she is less than a shadow in death.

The pain of living and the drug of dreams curl up the small soul in the window seat.