Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

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

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

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.

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.

In my beginning is my end.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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.

Human kind cannot bear very much reality. 6

Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb.

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

Yet we have gone on living, Living and partly living.

They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer. They know and do not know, that acting is suffering.

Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels Over the paving.

What seas what shores what gray rocks and what islands What water lapping the bow And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog What images return O my daughter.

The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying Unbroken wings. And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices And the weak spirit quickens to rebel For the bent goldenrod and the lost sea smell.

Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the center of the silent Word.

The time. Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream While jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair; Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair, Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair Climbing the third stair.

Terminate torment Of love unsatisfied The greater torment Of love satisfied.

Because I do not hope to turn again 5 Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn.

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

But if you understand or if you don’t

A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year.

Birth, and copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks.

Two live as one One live as two Two live as three Under the bam Under the boo Under the bamboo tree.

Into a stew. A nice little, white little, missionary stew!

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

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

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss.

Here is no water but only rock.

When lovely woman stoops to folly 4 and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.

Hurry up please its time.

But at my back from time to time I hear 3 The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water.