Great Throughts Treasury

"Because I know that time is time and place is always and only place and what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place, I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed faces and renounce the voice because I cannot hope to turn again."

"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."

"Before a Cat will condescend to treat you as a trusted friend, some little token of esteem Is needed, like a dish of cream; and you might now and then supply some caviare, or Strassburg Pie, some potted grouse, or salmon paste —he's sure to have his personal taste. (I know a Cat, who makes a habit of eating nothing else but rabbit, and when he's finished, licks his paws so's not to waste the onion sauce.) A Cat's entitled to expect these evidences of respect. And so in time you reach your aim, and finally call him by his name."

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

"Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, falls the Shadow."

"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."

"Business today consists in persuading crowds."

"Between the idea and the reality between the motion and the act falls the Shadow."

"But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things."

"But fare forward, voyagers."

"But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, though I have seen my head grown slightly bald brought in upon a platter."

"Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living."

"Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third."

"Dayodhuam: 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."

"Distracted from distraction by distraction."

"Destiny waits in the hands of God, shaping the still unshapen."

"Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it."

"Descend lower, descend only into the world of perpetual solitude, world not world, but that which is not world, internal darkness, deprivation and destitution of all property, desiccation of the world of sense, evacuation of the world of fancy, inoperancy of the world of spirit."

"Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways."

"Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen."

"Do I dare disturb the universe?"

"Each way means loneliness — and communion."

"Each day a raid on the inarticulate."

"Endless invention, endless experiment, brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness."

"Endurance of friendship does not depend upon ourselves, but upon circumstance. But circumstance is not undetermined. Unreal friendship may turn to real but real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended. Sooner shall enmity turn to alliance. The enmity that never knew friendship can sooner know accord."

"Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself."

"Every moment is a fresh beginning."

"Everyone's alone — or so it seems to me. They make noises, and think they are talking to each other; they make faces, and think they understand each other. And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?"

"Every writer owes something to Holmes."

"Fading, fading: strength beyond hope and despair climbing the third stair. Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only."

"Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose garden. My words echo thus, in your mind."

"Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance"

"Footsteps shuffled on the stair, under the firelight, under the brush, her hair spread out in fiery points glowed into words, then would be savagely still."

"Eyes I dare not meet in dreams"

"For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded."

"For all things exist as seen by thee, only as known by thee, all things exist only in thy light, and thy glory is declared even in that which denies thee; the darkness declares the glory of light. Those who deny thee could not deny, if thou didst not exist; and their denial is never complete, for if it were so, they would not exist. They affirm thee in living; all things affirm thee in living."

"For I have known them all already, known them all - have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? And I have known the eyes already, known them all - the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, and when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?"

"For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning."

"For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting."

"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."

"For you know only a heap of broken images ."

"For some are sane and some are mad and some are good and some are bad. And some are better, some are worse but all may be described in verse."

"Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man, of the men and women who shut the door and sit by the fire; who fear the blessing of God, the loneliness of the night of God, the surrender required, the deprivation inflicted; who fear the injustice of men less than the justice of God; who fear the hand at the window, the fire in the thatch, the fist in the tavern, the push into the canal, less than we fear the love of God."

"From such ground springs that which forever renews the earth. Though it is forever denied."

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"Friendship should be more than biting Time can sever."

"Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door. His name, as I ought to have told you before, is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss to pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus. His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake, and he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake. Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats —but no longer a terror to mice or to rats. For he isn't the Cat that he was in his prime; though his name was quite famous, he says, in his time. And whenever he joins his friends at their club (which takes place at the back of the neighbouring pub) he loves to regale them, if someone else pays, with anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days. For he once was a Star of the highest degree — he has acted with Irving, he's acted with Tree. And he likes to relate his success on the Halls, where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls. But his grandest creation, as he loves to tell, was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell."

"Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian."

"He is every bit as sane as you or I, He sees the world as clearly as you or I see it, it is only that he has seen a great deal more than that."

"He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon."