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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.

T. S. Eliot

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T. S. Eliot
Age: 76 †
Born: 1888
Born: September 26
Died: 1965
Died: January 4
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Lyricist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Social Critic
St. Louis
Missouri
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Eliot
T S Eliot
Thomas Eliot
T.S. Eliot
Better
Imitation
Take
Steal
Different
Copies
Something
Poets
Make
Mature
Good
Stealing
Deface
Poet
Immature
Least
Imitate

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Hurry up, please, its time.
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No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be: am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince.
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We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
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But what have I, but what have I, my friend, To give you, what can you receive from me? Only the friendship and the sympathy Of one about to reach her journey's end.
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These fragments I have shored against my ruins
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Where is the Life we lost in living?
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I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.
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When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.
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When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.
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That is the worst moment, when you feel you have lost / The desires for all that was most desirable, / Before you are contented with what you can desire / Before you know what is left to be desired / And you go on wishing that you could desire / What desire has left behind.
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Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
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Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign?
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We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.
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Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech
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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.
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I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
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To men of a certain type The suspicion that they are incapable of loving Is as disturbing to their self-esteem As, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.
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If one has to earn a living, therefore, the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts.
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The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.
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It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.
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