I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T. S. Eliot

If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T. S. Eliot

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."
T. S. Eliot

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot

In my beginning is my end.
T. S. Eliot

It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.
T. S. Eliot

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
T. S. Eliot

It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
T. S. Eliot

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
T. S. Eliot

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
T. S. Eliot

Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative.
T. S. Eliot

My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
T. S. Eliot

O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
T. S. Eliot

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot

Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment.
T. S. Eliot

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
T. S. Eliot

People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
T. S. Eliot

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
T. S. Eliot

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
T. S. Eliot

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T. S. Eliot