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

Do I dare Disturb the universe?

Time past and time futureWhat might have been and what has beenPoint to one end, which is always present.” (Four Quartets)

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

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

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent Godless people:Their only monument the asphalt roadAnd a thousand lost golf balls.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?When I count, there are only you and I togetherBut when I look ahead up the white roadThere is always another one walking beside youGliding wrapt in...

The world turns and the world changes,But one thing does not change.In all of my years, one thing does not change,However you disguise it, this thing does not change:The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

He’s outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)And his footprints are not found in any file of Scotland Yard’s.And when the larder’s looted, or the jewel-case is rifled,Or when the milk is missing, or...

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow.

To approach the stranger is to invite the unexpected, release a new force, let the genie out of the bottle. It is to start a new train of events that is beyond your control…

If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.

Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

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...

Only by acceptance of the past, can you alter it.

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

O the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter / And on her daughter / They wash their feet in soda water.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry –That is a life.

[Henry] James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a...

But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent...

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard spots.

We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.

It ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

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

The one thing you can do is to do nothing. Wait . . . You will find that you survive humiliation and hat’s an experience of incalculable value.

Between the desireAnd the spasm,Between the potencyAnd the existence,Between the essenceAnd the descent,Falls the Shadow.

Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;They called me the hyacinth girl.’ —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and...

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,It isn’t just one of your holiday games;You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatterWhen I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.First...

At the first turning of the second stair / I turned and saw below / The same shape twisted on the banister.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish.

Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

The journey not the arrival matters.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree / In the cool of the day.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in.

We must believe that ”emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from...

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse