All Quotes

"The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." 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 emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

"One thinks of all the hands That are raising dingy shades In a thousand furnished rooms."

"I am moved by fancies that are curled Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing."

"And I must borrow every changing shape To find expression."

"Stand on the highest pavement of the stair— Lean on a garden urn— Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair."

"Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand."

"Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose."

"Twelve o'clock. Along the reaches of the street Held in lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations, Its divisions and precisions."

"I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates."

"The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn."

"Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable law."

"His laughter tinkled among the teacups."

"He laughed like an irresponsible fœtus."

"Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain."

"Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!" The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness."

"Weave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob."

"After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What's not believed in, or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree."

"The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last We have not reached conclusion, when I Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last I have not made this show purposelessly And it is not by any concitation Of the backward devils. I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition. I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?"

"so the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed."

"The broad-backed hippopotamus Rests on his belly in the mud; Although he seems so firm to us He is merely flesh and blood."

"Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin"

"Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye is underlined for emphasis; Uncorseted, her friendly bust Gives promise of pneumatic bliss."

"Where are the eagles and the trumpets? Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps. Over buttered scones and crumpets Weeping, weeping multitudes Droop in a hundred A.B.C.'s"

"April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain."

"There is shadow under this red rock (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

"I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence."

"Unreal city, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many."

"O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— It's so elegant So intelligent"

"O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you."

"Who is the third who walks always beside you When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you"

"What is that sound high in the air Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal"

"In this decayed hole among the mountainsIn the faint moonlight, the grass is singingOver the tumbled graves, about the chapelThere is the empty chapel, only the wind's home."

"Then spoke the thunder DA Datta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed."

"I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison."

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih"

"Mistah Kurtz — he dead"

"A penny for the Old Guy"

"We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar."

"Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion."

"The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good."

"Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted."

"America has a new delicacy, a coarse, rank refinement."

"A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard."

"When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character."

"A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes."

"I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think that our commonwealth would have been shaken to its foundations if they had been handed in the moment after. They must go out now, with all their imperfections on their head, or rather on mine; for their vices are too vital to be improved with a blue pencil, or with anything I can think of, except dynamite. Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I had no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous."

"It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite. ... The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly "in the know." To flaunt the fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris. To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed's antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady's age. It is caddish because it is irrelevant. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion."

"Anomalies do matter very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract illogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm. And this for a reason that any one at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself. All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly; that it was not a grievance. It could do my subjects no harm; it could do me no good. The people of Battersea, they would say, might safely submit to it. But the people of Battersea could not safely submit to it, for all that. If I had nodded their heads for them for fifty years I could cut off their heads for them at the end of it with immeasurably greater ease. For there would have permanently sunk into every man's mind the notion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and irrational power. They would have grown accustomed to insanity."

"For my part, I should be inclined to suggest that the chief object of education should be to restore simplicity. If you like to put it so, the chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things."

"For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green."