“Not the intense momentIsolated, with no before and after,But a lifetime burning in every moment.”

“Home is where one starts from. As we grow olderThe world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicatedOf dead and living. Not the intense momentIsolated, with no before and after,But a lifetime burning in every momentAnd not the lifetime of one man onlyBut of old stones that cannot be deciphered.There is a time for the evening under starlight,A time for the evening under lamplight(The evening with the photograph album).Love is most nearly itselfWhen here and now cease to matter.Old men ought to be explorersHere or there does not matterWe must be still and still movingInto another intensityFor a further union, a deeper communionThrough the dark cold and the empty desolation,The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast watersOf the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”

“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.”

“The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

“Trying to use words, and every attemptIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in whichOne is no longer disposed to say it. And so each ventureIs a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulateWith shabby equipment always deterioratingIn the general mess of imprecision of feeling,”

“After the torchlight red on sweaty facesAfter the frosty silence in the gardensAfter the agony in stony placesThe shouting and the cryingPrison and palace and reverberationOf thunder of spring over distant mountainsHe who was living is now deadWe who were living are now dyingWith a little patience Here is no water but only rockRock and no water and the sandy roadThe road winding above among the mountainsWhich are mountains of rock without waterIf there were water we should stop and drinkAmongst the rock one cannot stop or thinkSweat is dry and feet are in the sandIf there were only water amongst the rockDead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spitHere one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountainsBut dry sterile thunder without rainThere is not even solitude in the mountainsBut red sullen faces sneer and snarlFrom doors of mudcracked houses If there were waterAnd no rockIf there were rockAnd also waterAnd water A springA pool among the rockIf there were the sound of water onlyNot the cicadaAnd dry grass singingBut sound of water over a rockWhere the hermit-thrush sings in the pine treesDrip drop drip drop drop drop dropBut there is no water- The Waste Land (ll. 322-358)”

“We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.”