T. S. Eliot

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

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

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree.

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

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.