Skip to content

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

— T. S. Eliot The Waste Land (1922)

Another quote →

Topics

Memory

More quotes by T. S. Eliot

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

Preface to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (1931)

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen.

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

All T. S. Eliot quotes →

You may also like

Women and elephants never forget an injury.

Saki Reginald (1904)

Man should possess an infinite appetite for life. It should be self-evident to him, all the time, that life is superb, glorious, endlessly rich, infinitely desirable.

Colin Wilson The Philosopher's Stone (1969)

To live in hearts we leave behind
Is not to die.

Thomas Campbell

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting.

William James The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: T. S. Eliot (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.