T.S. Eliot Quotes

I had seen birth and death
But had thought they were different.

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.

We are the hollow men.

Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

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.

So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

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.

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.

Speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe.

This is the death of air.

Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.

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

I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.

The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.

The intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.