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T. S. Eliot on Wedding

1888–1965 England

← All quotes by T. S. Eliot

6 quotes

Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

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)

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)

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: T. S. Eliot (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.