T.S. Eliot

"Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time. . . . a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . ."

"If time and space, as sages say,Are things which cannot be,The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we. So why, Love, should we ever pray To live a century?The butterfly that lives a day Has lived eternity."

"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"

"The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good."

"Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance"

"Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after,But a lifetime burning in every moment."

"Destiny waits in the hand of god, shaping the still unshapen.."

"A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give."

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

"Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring "the frontiers of the spirit." But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for all and settled. The frontiers of the spirit are more like the jungle which, unless continuously kept under control, is always ready to encroach and eventually obliterate the cultivated area."

"As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill."

"April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie,Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter."

"Till Human voices wake us, and we drown."

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

"Light Light The visible reminder of Invisible Light."

"So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore."

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these."

"Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea."

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper."