The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land’s edge also

To hear the latest Pole / transmit the Preludes, through his hair and fingertips.

In my beginning is my end.

It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

April is the cruelest month, breedinglilacs out of the dead land, mixingmemory and desire, stirringdull roots with spring rain.

The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood–Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.

There’s no vocabulary For love within a family, love that’s lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech....

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

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.