T. S. Eliot Quotes

It's defeatist to harp on what might have been, and yet, it's hard to resist considering what might have been.

The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories – not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.

Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.

She said a good day ain't got no rain She said a bad day is when I lie in the bed And I think of things that might have been

... we chase after ghosts and spirits and are left holding only memories and dreams. It's not that we want what we can't have; it's that we've held all we could want and then had to watch it slip away.

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.

You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didnt. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn't know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I thinkI done the best with itI knew how but itstill wasntmine. It neverhas been.

Most of us don't know about happiness until it's over.

Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion.

I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them.

...You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.

I don't know what else to tell you. I often think how different my life would have been - how much happier - if you'd been a part of it. One day.

For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? --some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning--indeed they did.

O Time and change! - with hair as gray as was my sire's that winter day, how strange it seems, with so much gone of life and love, to still live on!

In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she meant to answer with. . . .

There's no future in our past. Just experience. We want to return to it, but we don't want to close the door on it either.

Little things I should have said and done I just never took the time You were always on my mind

I'm that way, goofy as it sounds. Sometimes I don't want things to happen-I'm talking about good things, even wonderful things-because once they happen, I can't look forward to them anymore. But there's an upside, too. Once a wonderful thing is over, I'm not all that sad because then I can start thinking about it, reliving and reliving it in the virtual world in my head.

I'm nostalgic and I do think about a "what if."

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.