Quotes to inspire and reflect

O the chimneys On the ingeniously devised habitations of death When Israel’s body drifted as smoke Through the air— Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep, A star that turned black Or was it a ray of sun? 1

A corner draft fluttered the flame And the white fever of temptation Upswept its angel wings that cast A cruciform shadow.

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over, Snow swept the world from end to end. A candle burned on the table; A candle burned.

But what are pity, conscience, or fear To the brazen pair, compared With the living sorcery Of their hot embraces?

You are eternity’s hostage A captive of time.

I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees’ hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field. 1

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot.

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I must confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.

The matters I relate Are true lies. 3

Upon the clothes behind the tenement, That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines, Linking each flat, but to each indifferent, Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

I should be proud to have my memory graced, but only if the monument be placed… here, where I endured three hundred hours in line before the implacable iron bars.

That was a time when only the dead could smile.

If you can’t give me love and peace, Then give me bitter fame.

No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shielded my face. I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place.

To joyously savor one single instant of initial life I seek an innocent country 1

The only freedom the gods grant us Of our own free will to their sovereignty. Since only in the illusion of freedom

Just when you think you’re on the point of release From loneliness, then loneliness swoops down upon you.

How should I know what I’ll be, I who don’t know what I am? Be what I think? But I think of being so many things! And there are so many who think of being the same thing that we can’t all be it! Genius? At this moment A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they’re geniuses like me, And it may be that history won’t remember even one, All their imagined conquests amounting to so much dung.

A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well 10 When the tongues of flame are infolded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

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

Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove.

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.

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe. 9

In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of interminable night At the recurrent end of the unending After the dark dove with the flickering tongue Had passed below the horizon of his homing.

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.

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.

But fare forward, voyagers.

Time the destroyer is time the preserver.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable.

The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale’s backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices.

Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by the way which is the way of ignorance.

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, 8 and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God.

O dark dark dark. 7 They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

What is the late November doing With the disturbance of the spring.

Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity. His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare, And when you reach the scene of the crime— Macavity’s not there!

In my beginning is my end.

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always— Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars And reconciles forgotten wars.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.