T. S. Eliot Quotes

To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.

You wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom, you do everything to gain some right, and once it's gained you take no pleasure in it.

The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be.

For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

The essence of man is, discontent, divine discontent; a sort of love without a beloved, the ache we feel in a member we no longer have.

Sharp nostalgia, infinite and terrible, for what I already possess.

I knew my ways were unfulfilling. I chased power, pleasure, possessions, something satisfying. I knew I kept getting let down. I knew it was insanity, and I was never going to find fulfillment, but I didn't know what else to look for.

But then, my entire life is bullshit. The best things in it have vanished, ghosts. Ghosts I'll admit I created.

I lost track of it thereafter. I wish I had a piece of it. That would have been very, very nice. It was one of those little things they get you on the Bond and then suddenly your face is every which way.

God, I wish you could have been there.

Everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

We are poor, indeed, when we have no half-wishes left us. The heart and the imagination close the shutters the instant they are gone.

She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

We part more easily with what we possess, than with our expectations of what we wish for; because expectation always goes beyond enjoyment.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

There's no ifs and buts or maybes, you're gonna miss, you're gonna miss my loving.

There was always something missing in Montreal.

I finally had what I'd wantes all those years. Except now that I had it, i felt as empty as this unkempt pool I was dangling my legs into.

You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.

What are these voices outside love's open door, make us throw off our contentment, and beg for something more?

Some of these days, Oh, you'll miss me honey

This is a difference between us: you desire what other people have, while I desire the things I used to have, or think I might have one day.

It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)

The want of a thing is perplexing enough, but the possession of it, is intolerable.