T. S. Eliot

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

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

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

His laughter tinkled among the teacups.

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?

Liberty is a different kind of pain from prison.

I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.

Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.

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.

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.

So the lover must struggle for words.

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.

The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.