Distracted from distraction by distraction

There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.

I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

Bustopher Jones is not skin and bones — In fact, he’s remarkably fat.He doesn’t haunt pubs — he has eight or nine clubs,For he’s the St. James’s Street Cat!He’s the Cat we all greet as...

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes.

It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in infomation?

Someone 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.

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spentIf the unheard, unspokenWord is unspoken, unheard;Still is the spoken word, the Word unheard,The Word without a word, the Word withinThe world and for...

Humankind cannot bear too much reality.

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value — a test, it is true, which can only be...

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter

The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

And right action is freedom from past and future also.For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. “The Dry Salvages

Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour,...

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to...

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet...

My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. ‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. ‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? ‘I never know what you are thinking. Think.

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.

Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer were a very notorious couple of cats.As knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians,Tight-rope walkers and acrobatsThey had an extensive reputation.[…]When the family assembled for Sunday dinner,With their minds made up that they wouldn’t get...

Here we go round the prickly pear / At five o’clock in the morning.

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.

Redeem / The time. Redeem / The unread vision in the higher dream.

There is no method but to be very intelligent.

Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,I had not thought death had undone so many.Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,And each man fixed his eyes...

Destiny waits in the hand of god, shaping the still unshapen..

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two...

Though you forget the way to the Temple,There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger.

A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Footfalls echo in the memory, Down the passage which we did not take, Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

Ash on an old man’s sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave, / Dust in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended.

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.

We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the...

They constantly try to escapeFrom the darkness outside and withinBy dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.But the man that is shall shadowThe man that pretends to be.

And we must think no further of you.

Our emotions are only ”incidents in the effort to keep day and night together.

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

In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

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

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...

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim...