Quotes from T.S. Eliot

The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be complete which does not include the articulate formulation of life which human minds make.

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.

I suspect, in fact, that a good deal of the value of an interpretation is -- that it should be my own interpretation.

Hay épocas en que uno siente que ha caído a pedazos y a la vez se ve a sí mismo en mitad de la carretera estudiando las piezas sueltas, preguntándose si será capaz de montarlas otra vez y qué especie de artefacto saldrá.

For what is more formal than a family dinner? An official occasion of uncomfortable people Who meet very seldom, making conversation.

Not such a compliment: she only wanted To have a tame daughter-in-law with very little money, A housekeeper-companion for her and Harry. Even when he married, she still held on to me

Humility is endless.

And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of things ill done and done to others' harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.

Anything is possible, but many things are highly unlikely. Only those who will risk going to far can possibly find out how far one can go.

And what is the real you. I haven't much experience, But I see something now which doesn't come from tutors Or from books, or from thinking, or from observation:

All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down This: were we led all that way for Birth or Death?

But I thought I might escape from one life to another, And it may be all one life, with no escape.

And I hear your voice as in the silence Between two storms, one hears the moderate usual noises In the grass and leaves, of life persisting, Which ordinarily pass unnoticed.

He is maintaining substantially the same theory as that of Purgatorio XVIII: "Then, even as fire moves upward by reason of its form, whose nature it is to ascend, there where it endures longest in its material; so the enamoured mind falls to desire, which is a spiritual movement, and never rests until the object of its love makes it rejoice".

Let the vicars retire. Men do not need the Church In the place where they work, but where they spend their Sundays.

It's just ordinary hopelessness.

These are the ones that suffer least: The aconite under the snow And the snowdrop crying for a moment in the wood.

T.S. Eliot said to me "There's only one way a poet can develop his actual writing – apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud – and it doesn't matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it's in another language.) What matters above all, is educating the ear.

Silence! and preserve respectful distance. For I perceive approaching The Rock. Who will perhaps answer our doubtings. The Rock. The Watcher. The Stranger. He who has seen what has happened And who sees what is to happen. The Witness. The Critic. The Stranger. The God-shaken, in whom is the truth inborn.

I say to you: Make perfect your will. I say: take no thought of the harvest, But only of proper sowing.

For Browning, Mr. Pound has always professed strong admiration (see Mesmerism in Personae); there are traces of him in Cino and Famam Librosque Cano, in the same volume. But it is more profitable to comment upon the variety of metres and the original use of language. Ezra Pound

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 Unrecognised by other men, though sometimes by each other.

Pain is the opposite of joy But joy is a kind of pain

At the beginning, eight years ago, I felt, at first, that sense of separation, Of isolation unredeemable, irrevocable— It's eternal, or gives a knowledge of eternity, Because it feels eternal while it lasts. That is one hell.