Quote

Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.

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
Critical
Constructing
Indeed
Correcting
Labor
Combining
Probably
Composing
Creative
Testing
Part
Toil
Work
Author
Sifting
Much
Larger
Frightful

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That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.
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I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones.
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The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
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The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
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Art is the escape from personality.
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Do I dare disturb the universe?
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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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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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Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.
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When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience ?in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.
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Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind.
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Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
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In my beginning is my end.
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In life there is not time to grieve long.
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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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The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
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The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.
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