T. S. Eliot Quotes

We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.

For I have known them all already,known them all.
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall,
Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat.

Do I dare Disturb the universe?

And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression ... dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance

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; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous — Almost, at times, the Fool.

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.

My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. . . . In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me.

What day is the day that we know that we hope for or fear for? Every day is the day we should fear from or hope from. One moment Weighs like another. Only in retrospection, selection, We say, that was the day. The critical moment That is always now, and here.

This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

life is long between the desire and the spasm.