The Oxford dictionary of modern quotations (34 page)

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.

East Coker (1940) pt. 5

Success is relative:

It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

Family Reunion (1939) pt. 2, sc. 3

Agatha! Mary! come!

The clock has stopped in the dark!

Family Reunion (1939) pt. 2, sc. 3

Round and round the circle

Completing the charm

So the knot be unknotted

The cross be uncrossed

The crooked be made straight

And the curse be ended.

Family Reunion (1939) pt. 2, sc. 3

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Little Gidding (1942) pt. 1

Ash on an old man's sleeve

Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

Dust in the air suspended

Marks the place where a story ended.

Dust inbreathed was a house--

The wall, the wainscot and the mouse.

The death of hope and despair,

This is the death of air.

Little Gidding (1942) pt. 2

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

To purify the dialect of the tribe

And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.

Little Gidding (1942) pt. 2

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Little Gidding (1942) pt. 5

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.

Little Gidding (1942) pt. 5

A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, 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.

Little Gidding (1942) pt. 5

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

Little Gidding (1942) pt. 5

Yet we have gone on living,

Living and partly living.

Murder in the Cathedral (1935) pt. 1

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Murder in the Cathedral (1935) pt. 1

Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the stone from stone,

take the skin from the arm, take the muscle from bone, and wash them.

Murder in the Cathedral (1935) pt. 2

Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth

living.

Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948) ch. 1

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,

There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.

He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:

At whatever time the deed took place--MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!

And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known

(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)

Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time

Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) "Macavity: the Mystery Cat."

Cf. Conan Doyle 69:16

The host with someone indistinct

Converses at the door apart,

The nightingales are singing near

The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood

When Agamemnon cried aloud

And let their liquid siftings fall

To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

Poems (1919) "Sweeney among the Nightingales"

The hippopotamus's day

Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;

God works in a mysterious way--

The Church can feed and sleep at once.

Poems (1919) "The Hippopotamus"

Polyphiloprogenitive

The sapient sutlers of the Lord

Drift across window-panes

In the beginning was the Word.

Poems (1919) "Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service"

Webster was much possessed by death

And saw the skull beneath the skin;

And breastless creatures underground

Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

Poems (1919) "Whispers of Immortality"

Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye

Is underlined for emphasis;

Uncorseted, her friendly bust

Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

Poems (1919) "Whispers of Immortality"

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Poems 1909-1925 (1925) "The Hollow Men"

Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow.

Poems 1909-1925 (1925) "The Hollow Men"

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Poems 1909-1925 (1925) "The Hollow Men"

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table.

Prufrock (1917) "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

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.

Prufrock (1917) "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Prufrock (1917) "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Prufrock (1917) "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

Prufrock (1917) "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince.

Prufrock (1917) "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

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 upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Prufrock (1917) "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o'clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

Prufrock (1917) "Preludes"

Every street lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drum,

And through the spaces of the dark

Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Prufrock (1917) "Rhapsody on a Windy Night"

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids

Sprouting despondently at area gates.

Prufrock (1917) "Morning at the Window"

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair--

Lean on a garden urn--

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

Prufrock (1917) "La Figlia Che Piange"

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze

The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.

Prufrock (1917) "La Figlia Che Piange"

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The Rock (1934) pt. 1

And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:

Their only monument the asphalt road

And a thousand lost golf balls."

The Rock (1934) pt. 1

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.

Sacred Wood (1920) "Tradition and Individual Talent"

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an

"objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation,

a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion;

such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory

experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Sacred Wood (1920) "Hamlet and his Problems"

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Sacred Wood (1920) "Philip Massinger"

Birth, and copulation, and death.

That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks:

Birth, and copulation, and death.

I've been born, and once is enough.

Sweeney Agonistes (1932) p. 24

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from

which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was

due to the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton

and Dryden.

Times Literary Supplement 20 Oct. 1921

We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as

it exists at present, must be difficult.

Times Literary Supplement 20 Oct. 1921

Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses' heels

Over the paving.

Triumphal March (1931)

April is the cruellest 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.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 1

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 1

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.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 1. Cf. Joseph Conrad 60:4

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 1

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.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 1

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 2 (cf. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra act 2,

sc. 2, l. 199)

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 2

I think we are in rats' alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 2

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag--

It's so elegant

So intelligent.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 2. Cf. Gene Buck and Herman Ruby

Hurry up please it's time.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 2

But at my back from time to time I hear

The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring

Sweeney to Mrs Porter in the spring.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter

And on her daughter

They wash their feet in soda water.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 3. Cf. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1979)

332:19

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I, Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 3

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest--

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 3

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 3

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 4

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.

Waste Land (1922) pt. 5

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light