Great Throughts Treasury

"There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle."

"There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not."

"There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; there will be time to murder and create, and time for all the works and days of hands, that lift and drop a question on your plate; time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea."

"There's no water here is just a rock, rock with no water and the sandy road. The road winding among the mountains above us between rocks boulders without water. If there were water and drank standing but among the rocks, or think you cannot afford a pot and dry feet stuck in the sand. If it were water flowed from the rock. Dead mountain mouth is rotten teeth cannot spit. Here you cannot afford to sit or lie, I is not even silence in the mountains only dry sterile thunder without rain, and even solitude in the mountains is not only gloomy red faces - mock and scoff. At the door of the cracked clay huts if there were water and no rock. If there were rock but water and the water source in the rock pond if there was even the sound of water. A cicada is not dry grass and singing. But sound of water the rock where the hermit thrush-singing among pines. Krop drip drip drip drip full stop drip. But there is no water Who is the third who walks always beside you? If we count, we are just you and me But when I look ahead into the white road always someone else walks beside you, STAP wrapped brown jacket, the hood I do not know if it's a woman or a man - who is this, who is going after your other side? What is the sound high in the air murmur of maternal lamentation What is the hordes in hoods, as swarms of the endless plains, stuck on cracked earth surrounded by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountain chain breaks and heals and splatters - in purple wind collapsing towers."

"There's no vocabulary for love within a family, love that's lived in but not looked at, love within the light of which all else is seen, the love within which all other love finds speech. This love is silent."

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

"They don't understand what it is to be awake, to be living on several planes at once though one cannot speak with several voices at once."

"They had an extensive reputation."

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"

"Things … Can it be … really! … No! … Yes! …"

"Think neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree."

"Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground."

"They speak better than they know, and beyond your understanding."

"Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison."

"This form, this face, this life living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, the awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships."

"Think. Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree."

"This is how the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper."

"This is one moment, but know that another shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy."

"This love is silent."

"This oval O cropped out with teeth."

"Till Human voices wake us, and we drown."

"Those who trust us educate us."

"Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time."

"Time past and time future, what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present."

"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."

"Time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea."

"To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, you must go by away 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."

"To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now."

"To country people Cows are mild, and flee from any stick they throw; but I’m a timid town bred child, and all the cattle seem to know."

"To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life."

"To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;"

"To men of a certain type the suspicion that they are incapable of loving is as disturbing to their self-esteem. As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence."

"Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish."

"Turning wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucauld, if the street were time and he as the end of the street."

"Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure because one has only learnt to get the better of words. For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling,"

"Twelve o'clock. Along the reaches of the street Held in a lunar synthesis."

"To rest in your own suffering is evasion of suffering. We must learn to suffer more."

"Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values."

"Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them."

"Uncorsetted, her friendly bust gives promise of pneumatic bliss."

"Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith The army of unalterable law."

"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. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, to where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours with a dead sound on the final stock of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him crying: 'Stetson! You, who were with me in the ships at Mylae! That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, or with his nails he'll dig it up again! You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere!"

"Unreal friendship may turn to real but real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended"

"Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought."

"War among men defiles this world."

"War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted."

"We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men leaning together headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion."

"We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly."

"We ask only to be reassured about the noises in the cellar and the window that should not have been open"

"We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."