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As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

T. S. Eliot

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T. S. Eliot
Age: 76 †
Born: 1888
Born: September 26
Died: 1965
Died: January 4
Critic
Essayist
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Poet
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St. Louis
Missouri
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Eliot
T S Eliot
Thomas Eliot
T.S. Eliot
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Quick now, here, now, always- A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.
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Ash on an old man's sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave, / Dust in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended.
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Past art is subject to change.
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In a world of fugitives the one who stays home will seem to be running away
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Humankind can't stand too much reality.
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I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. . . . So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
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Talent imitates, but genius steals.
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Every end is a beginning...And every beginning is an end.
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No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change.
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Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.
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Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
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The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.
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If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby 'it.'
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It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
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The endless cycle of idea and action, / Endless invention, endless experiment, / Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness / Knowledge of speech, but not of silence / Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
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The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.
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Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
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Turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he as the end of the street.
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O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant
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No place of grace for those who avoid the Face. No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the Voice.
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