Eliot Quotes Flashcards
Urban Decay
“And newspapers from vacant lots”
“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes”
“Remark that cat that flattens itself in the gutter, slips out its tongue and devours a morsel of rancid butter”
“And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly, and the villages dirty and charging high prices”
Modernism vs Romanticism
“The grimy scraps of withered leaves about your feet”
“You heard the sparrows in the gutters”
“Till human voices wake us and we drown”
“The moon has lost her memory, a washed out smallpox cracks her face”
“Here we go round the prickly pear, at five o’clock in the morning”
“Six hands at an open door, dicing for pieces of silver, and feet kicking the empty wine-skins”
Naturalism vs Religion
“The notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing”
“Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh”
“To say; ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”
“Every street lamp that I pass beats like a fatalistic drum”
“Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life. The last twist of the knife”
“Those who have crossed with direct eyes to death’s other kingdom”
“The eyes are not here, there are no eyes here”
“Were we led all this way for a birth or a death”
“I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different”
Time
“The winter evening settles down, with smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock”
“And then the lighting of the lamps”
“There will be time to murder and create”
“Time yet for a hundred indecisions, a hundred visions and revisions”
“The street lamp sputtered, the street lamp muttered”
“Held in a lunar synthesis, whispering lunar incantations”
“This is the way the world ends (x3) not with a bang but a whimper”
“A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of year, for a journey, and such a long journey”
The Condition of Mankind
“With all its muddy feet that press to early coffee stands”
“One thinks of all the hands that are raising dingy shades”
“When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall”
“I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas”
“So the hand of a child, automatic, slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay”
“Here the stone images are raised, here they receive the supplication of a dead man’s hand, under the twinkly of a fading star”
“This birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death”
“But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their Gods”
