813 Quotes by T. S. Eliot

Cling, swing, Spring, sing, Swing up into the apple tree.

I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates.

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

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

As a rule, with me an unfinished [idea] is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It's better, if there's something good in it that I might make use of elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it's in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part.

These are only hints an guesses... the rest is prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.