T. S. Eliot Quotes

You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.

We'll grow old waiting.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion. the only other living thing a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding, sunlit blue. And yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain- the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water.

People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come.

I thoroughly object to getting old. If you could let me be 16 again, I'd give you everything I've got and everything I'll ever have.

Once, I went speeding past an old couple and smiled as I imagined their conversation: him grumbling about me and her telling him not to be such an old grouch. Then, suddenly I was in tears, thinking, 'I'll never get to be a grumpy old grandpa!'

I'm growing old, I delight in the past.

I always say I was born too late in the world, too old.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

I don't stretch my hand out anymore, but I never get tired of waiting for the next magic.

Human life, old and young, takes place between hope and remembrance. The young man sees all the gates to his desires open, and the old man remembers--his hopes.

What should we speak of When we are old as you? when we shall hear The rain and wind beat dark December? how, In this our pinching cave, shall we discourse The freezing hours away?

There's no dew left on the daisies and clover; there's no rain left in heaven.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

I lived with the terrible knowledge that one day I would be an old man still waiting for my real life to start. Already, I pitied that old man.

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged.

The world is a drought when out of love.

Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.

Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, A hand that can be clasp'd no more - Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door. He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Shall I never see a bachelor of three score again?

I lay my head on the railroad track, waitin' on the Double E. But the train don't run by here no more, poor, poor, pitiful me.

Old men's eyes are like old men's memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.

And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.

As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.