T. S. Eliot - The Waste Land (1922)

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One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

T. S. Eliot
All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.

T. S. Eliot
I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

T. S. Eliot
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

T. S. Eliot
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

T. S. Eliot
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.

T. S. Eliot
Who is the third who walks always beside you
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you

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

T. S. Eliot
But at my back from time to time I hear
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.

T. S. Eliot
Then spoke the thunder
DA Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed.

T. S. Eliot
To me…[The Waste Land] was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.

T. S. Eliot
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble.

T. S. Eliot
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

T. S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

T. S. Eliot
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

T. S. Eliot
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives.

T. S. Eliot
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.

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

T. S. Eliot
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon

T. S. Eliot
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.

T. S. Eliot
I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled.

T. S. Eliot
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards.

T. S. Eliot
Turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he as the end of the street.

T. S. Eliot
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It's so elegant
So intelligent

T. S. Eliot
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.

T. S. Eliot
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

T. S. Eliot
You know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T. S. Eliot
Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

T. S. Eliot
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

T. S. Eliot