188 quotes
When the day's hustle and bustle is done,
Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate
Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.
Choruses from The Rock (1934)
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
Poems (1920)
Grishkin is nice: her
Russian eye is underlined for emphasis;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.
Poems (1920)
And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression.
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
Ash-Wednesday (1930)
I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
Jellicle Cats come out tonight,
Jellicle Cats come one come all:
The Jellicle Moon is shining bright —
Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
The sleek Brazilian jaguar
Does not in its arboreal gloom
Distil so rank a feline smell
As Grishkin in a drawing-room.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.
What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
The Cocktail Party (1949)