This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. - T. S. Eliot

The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.