20 quotes
A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
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.
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.
Every moment is a fresh beginning.
The Cocktail Party (1949)
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.
Ash-Wednesday (1930)
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker...
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917)
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end.
Ash-Wednesday (1930)
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied.
Ash-Wednesday (1930)
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
Ash-Wednesday (1930)
Can we only love
Something created in our own imaginations?
Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable?
Then one is alone, and if one is alone
Then lover and beloved are equally unreal
And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.
The Cocktail Party (1949)
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.