Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.

I don’t think good poetry can be produced in a kind of political attempt to overthrow some existing form. I think it just supersedes. People find a way in which they can say something. “I can’t say it that way, what way can I find that will do?”

We die to each other daily.

What we know of other people

Is only our memory of the moments

During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.

To pretend that they and we are the same

Is a useful and convenient social convention

Which must sometimes broken. We must also remember

That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

I believe the moment of birth

Is when we have knowledge of death

I believe the season of birth

Is the season of sacrifice.

It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.

Resign yourself to be the fool you are.

To rest in your own suffering

Is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more.

What is hell? Hell is oneself.

Hell is alone, the other figures in it

Merely projections.

You now have learned enough to see

That Cats are much like you and me

And other people whom we find

Possessed of various types of mind.

For some are sane and some are mad

And some are good and some are bad

And some are better, some are worse —

But all may be described in verse.

That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost

The desires for all that was most desirable,

Before you are contented with what you can desire;

Before you know what is left to be desired;

And you go on wishing that you could desire

What desire has left behind. But you cannot understand.

How could you understand what it is to feel old?

The circle of our understanding

Is a very restricted area.

To men of a certain type

The suspicion that they are incapable of loving

Is as disturbing to their self-esteem

As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Everyone's alone — or so it seems to me.

They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;

They make faces, and think they understand each other.

And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?

I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don’t know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren’t bothered by each other.

Two people who know they do not understand each other,

Breeding children whom they do not understand

And who will never understand them.

As a rule, with me an unfinished thing is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.

Every moment is a fresh beginning.

In a play, from the beginning, you have to realize that you’re preparing something which is going into the hands of other people, unknown at the time you’re writing it.

Each way means loneliness — and communion.

Destiny waits in the hands of God, shaping the still unshapen.

I see nothing quite conclusive in the art of temporal government,

But violence, duplicity and frequent malversation.

King rules or barons rule:

The strong man strongly and the weak man by caprice.

They have but one law, to seize the power and keep it.

Friendship should be more than biting Time can sever.

Only the fool, fixed in his folly, may think

He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

T. S. ELIOT, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.

T. S. ELIOT, "The Dry Salvages", Four Quartets

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

T. S. ELIOT, "Burnt Norton", Four Quartets

War among men defiles this world.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And I wander alone
Without haste without hope without fear
Without pressure or touch--
There is no moan
Of Souls dying
Nothing here
But the warm
Dry airless sweet scent
Of the alleys of death
Of the corridors of death

T. S. ELIOT, "In silent corridors of death"

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.

T. S. ELIOT, New York Post, September 23, 1963

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