Eliot quotes:

Send

--
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. -- Robert Morgan
Both T.S. Eliot and I like to play, but I like to play euchre, while he likes to play Eucharist. -- Robert Frost
The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted. -- Jonah Lehrer
George Eliot has the heart of Sappho; but the face, with the long proboscis, the protruding teeth of the Apocalyptic horse, betrayed animality. -- George Meredith
Someone once accused me of being like Eliot Ness. I sad no sir, I'm not E.N., but I can promise you that I'm not Al Capone! -- Robert Stack
Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year. -- Paul Muldoon
Most people think that George Nelson, Charles Eames and Eliot Noyes invented industrial design. That is, of course, an exaggeration. George did it without any assistance from the other two. -- Bill N. Lacy
I live a lonely photographic life here in Santa Fe. I do see Eliot Porter occasionally, and Ansel storms through every so often, otherwise I plug along in my old fashioned way. -- Laura Gilpin
We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly. -- Virginia Woolf
Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb. -- Bob Dylan
T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot. -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action. -- Russell Kirk
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes. -- Joyce Carol Oates
What is that *smell*?"Eliot shook his head. "I keep telling you, it's fresh air. -- Keith R.A. DeCandido
I had not read George Eliot, so read a few. I felt ashamed I hadn't read "Middlemarch" before. -- Stephen Dobyns
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. -- John Updike
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. -- Howard Nemerov
Besides the aesthetics, besides teaching an appreciation of T.S. Eliot, a basic need is fulfilled when you teach English at CUNY. -- Billy Collins
If I get one more person telling me I look like Eliot Spitzer, I'm just going to have to play the guy one day. -- Michael Kelly
George Eliot tenderly carried in her heart the burdens of our race. She looked through pity's tears upon the faults and frailties of mankind. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
There's a good deal in Pound's and Eliot's poetry that stood up even though their politics were deplorable. Or Pound's very deplorable, Eliot's kind of deplorable. -- Robert Hass
I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting. -- Gabrielle Aplin
It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker. -- Katy Lederer
There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil. -- Dorothy Parker
My idea of good company, Mr. Eliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company. -- Jane Austen
I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons. -- Marguerite Young
Needle in a haystack's easy - just bring a magnet."Eliot stared witheringly at Hardison. "You take the poetry out of everything.""Says the man who'd just punch the haystack. -- Keith R.A. DeCandido
My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband. -- A. S. Byatt
--
Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it. -- Gore Vidal
--
I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot. -- Elizabeth Gilbert
One of the many things I said was that Eliot Spitzer had one set of rules for himself and one set for everyone else. I never would have imagined it could be so glaring. -- John Faso
I have but one life to give to adventure. " Alexander Eliot -" Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible. -- Matt Bors
T.S. Eliot was one of the first poets introduced to me when I started studying literature and has felt like a close friend ever since. No one nails urban despair quite like Eliot. -- Penelope Mitchell
Always in England if you had the type of brain that was capable of understanding T.S. Eliot's poetry or Kant's logic, you could be sure of finding large numbers of people who would hate you violently. -- D. J. Taylor
I unlearned the model of being an editor like Ezra Pound with T.S. Eliot, the unconscious belief that America was the center of the world, and that honesty meant saying what I thought and always being direct. -- Lynne Tillman
I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about. -- Marcus Mumford
At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens. -- Michel Faber
I would like to work with Paul McCartney in the future. Or Brian Seltzer. But I guess like, like I said - I'm into The Strokes, like Ben Folds, Eliot Smith, the Beatles are my favorite, the Beach Boys, Queen. -- Drake Bell
Praise be to Nero's Neptune The Titanic sails at dawn And everybody's shouting "Which Side Are You On?" And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot Fighting in the captain's tower While calypso singers laugh at them And fishermen hold flowers. -- Bob Dylan
The tragedy of Eliot Spitzer is almost Greek: Ascendant son of wealth and privilege dedicates his life to social justice, warns of the corruption lurking among us, and falls victim to his inner demons at the very moment of vindication. -- Wil S. Hylton
I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history. -- A. E. Housman
It's a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous. -- Mona Simpson
T.S. Eliot, who learned to swim at the same beach as I did, just threw in the towel and moved to Cheyne Walk. I'm not going to do that but I'm not scared of the open channel between me and Britain. -- William Monahan
The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment. -- Cynthia Ozick
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks. -- Howard Nemerov
Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry. -- Clive James
My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her. -- Jacob Rothschild
So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms. -- Philip Kitcher
As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be. -- Ian Mcewan
originality" is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T.S.] Eliot states it with surprising naÃ¯vetÃ©: "It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries. -- Randall Jarrell
--
I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot. -- George Eliot
What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up. -- Alanis Morissette
Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings. -- Sidney Hook
i will show you fear in a handful of dust." t.s. eliot we don't actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace. -- T. S. Eliot

Send