Great Throughts Treasury

"I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom to lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition. I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it since what is kept must be adulterated? I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: how should I use them for your closer contact?"

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

"I think we are in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones."

"I suppose some editors are failed writers; but so are most writers."

"I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don’t know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren’t bothered by each other."

"If Hell is where nothing connects, then being in the field of English must be the key to heaven's door! We are in the business of finding connections--within texts, between texts and contexts, between texts and ourselves, between our readings and the readings of other interpreters."

"If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent if the unheard, unspoken word is unspoken, unheard; still is the spoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within the world and for the world; and the light shone in the darkness and against the Word the unstilled world still whirled about the center of the silent Word. Oh my people, what have I done unto thee. Where shall the word be found, where shall the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence."

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."

"If we all were judged according to the consequences of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention and beyond our limited understanding of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned."

"If time and space, as sages say, are things which cannot be, the sun which does not feel decay no greater is than we. So why, Love, should we ever pray to live a century? The butterfly that lives a day has lived eternity."

"If I do not have hope, I have returned since I do not have hope. If I do not hope to come back to desire the benefits of other people I'm not trying to fight for these things (Why the old eagle wings unfurl?) Why should I mourn the past glory of the normal realm? Since I do not have hope, I have experienced the glory of a particular moment uncertain Since I do not know If it never be put under the Real, which passes If I cannot drink From flowers trees and source of rivers, because nothing is no longer there When I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what happens, it happens only once and only in one place, I'm glad that it's like a beloved face renounce voice and If I cannot have hope, I yet returned I rejoice that I have to create something sprawling by. What joy I pray to God for mercy upon us and I pray that I may forget about things that weigh in the very consciously, An over-debated If I do not have hope, I have returned Let them say for me, these words because what happened, I cannot let the court on us not be too harsh Since we do not carry my wings in space, only beating the air with an effort in vain Now, completely barren, Pró?niejsze and more barren than the will, Learn We like to take care and not to care how quietly teach us. Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death."

"If the reader says the state of affairs which I wish to bring about is right, or is just, or is inevitable and if this must lead into further deterioration, then I will have no quarrel with it. I might even, in some circumstances, feel obliged to support him."

"If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby it."

"In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

"If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin."

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

"In a play, from the beginning, you have to realize that you’re preparing something which is going into the hands of other people, unknown at the time you’re writing it."

"In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not."

"In order to arrive there, 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 a way which is the way of ignorance in order to possess what you do not possess. You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not you must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know and what you own is what you do not own and where you are is where you are not."

"In a world of lunacy Violence, stupidity, greed...it is a good life."

"In life there is not time to grieve long."

"In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish."

"In spite of all the dishonor, the broken standards, the broken lives, the broken faith in one place or another, there was something left that was more than the tales of old men on winter evenings."

"In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo."

"In the vain laughter of folly, wisdom hears half its applause."

"In such a society as I imagine, as in any that is not petrified, there will be innumerable seeds of decay. Any human scheme for society is realized only when the great mass of humanity has become adapted to it; but this adaptation becomes also, insensibly, an adaptation of the scheme itself to the mass on which it operates: the overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution, and what is realized is so unlike the end that enthusiasm conceived, that foresight would weaken the effort."

"In this brief transit where the dreams cross. The dream-crossed twilight between birth and dying (Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things from the wide window towards the granite shore. 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 golden-rod and the lost sea smell quickens to recover the cry of quail and the whirling plover and the blind eye creates the empty forms between the ivory gates. And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth. This is the time of tension between dying and birth. The place of solitude where three dreams cross between blue rocks. But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away, let the other yew be shaken and reply."

"It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome."

"Infinitely suffering thing. Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; the worlds revolve like ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots."

"It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it."

"It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."

"It is human, when we do not understand another human being, and cannot ignore him, to exert an unconscious pressure on that person to turn him into something that we can understand: many husbands and wives exert this pressure on each other. The effect on the person so influenced is liable to be the repression and distortion, rather than the improvement, of the personality; and no man is good enough to have the right to make another over in his own image."

"It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us to escape, not from our own time - for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time."

"It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. 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."

"It is impossible to say just what I mean!"

"It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves."

"It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both."

"It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind."

"It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things."

"It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are... We must always take risks. That is our destiny..."

"A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter. And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow. There were times we regretted the summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, and the silken girls bringing sherbet. Then the camel men cursing and grumbling and running away, and wanting their liquor and women, and the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices: A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, sleeping in snatches, with the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation, with a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, and three trees on the low sky. And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow. Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins. But there was no information, and so we continued and arrived at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory. All this was a long time ago, I remember, and I would do it again, but set down this set down this: were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different; this Birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death. We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. I should be glad of another death."

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

"It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them."

"Lady of silences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful The single Rose Is now the Garden Where all loves end Terminate torment Of love unsatisfied The greater torment Of love satisfied End of the endless Journey to no end Conclusion of all that Is inconclusible speech without word and word of no speech. Grace to the Mother for the garden where all love ends."

"Last season's fruit is eaten and the full-fed beast shall kick the empty pail. For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice."

"Last year's words belong to last year's language, and next year's words await another voice."

"Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree : you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say 'this we know'."

"Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative."

"Life is long between the desire and the spasm."