Eliot Quotes

..."originality” is everyone's aim, and novel techniques are as much prized as new scientific discoveries. [T. S. ] Eliot states it with surprising naïveté: "It is exactly as wasteful for a poet to do what has been done already as for a biologist to rediscover Mendel's discoveries.”. (Randall Jarrell)
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. View quote
Howard Nemerov
I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks. View quote
Howard Nemerov
I think it was T.S. Eliot who talked about good poetry being felt before it's understood. I believe that. There are some bands where I love their lyrics but I don't have a clue what they're on about. View quote
Marcus Mumford
I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons. View quote
Marguerite Young
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. View quote
Robert Morgan
Someone once accused me of being like Eliot Ness. I sad no sir, I'm not E.N., but I can promise you that I'm not Al Capone! View quote
Robert Stack
There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear. View quote
Ursula K. Le Guin
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
I had always had grave doubts about Eliot's taste and, indeed, intelligence. [T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 1980]. View quote
Anthony Burgess
There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil. (Dorothy Parker)
I have been influenced by the Bible, Bach's music and contemporarily by Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams and Hopkins. View quote
Marianne Moore
T. S. Eliot said it is no business of the artist to think. I presume he meant it's only the business of the artist to feel, but I like the notion of there being a mind behind the fiction that I read and that I write. View quote
John Banville
Yet what representative trio do not make a mad trio? Blake, Mrs. Aphra Behn, Zeno - not a typical but a representative threesome... Things do not go in simple pairs. Poetry is not a case of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Shelley and Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bridges and Masefield, Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot. Poetry is some awkward trio - like Caedmon, Oliver Goldsmith, Edna St. Vincent Millay. So with the novel. View quote
Laura Riding
Learning is not doing; it is reflecting on doing. T. S. Eliot writes in one of his poems, "We had the experience but missed the meaning.” Reflection is about getting the meaning. View quote
Henry Mintzberg
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot Fighting in the captain's tower While calypso singers laugh at them And fishermen hold flowers... View quote
Bob Dylan
Almost alone among cognitive-aesthetic movements and strategies of interpretation, deconstruction neither champions any body of past literature or art, nor does it act as vanguard or advocate for any contemporary or incipient school. The New Criticism and T. S. Eliot strove for the revaluation of Metaphysical poetry so as to underwrite, in turn, certain tactics of modenity. Aristotle was advocate for Sophocles. Deconstruction is, intentionally, marginal (a key trope) to all histories of taste and manifestos for innovation. View quote
George Steiner
The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior. Suddenly I discover that I am ministering to AIDS victims to enhance my resume. I find I renounced ice cream for Lent to lose five excess pounds... I have fallen victim to what T. S. Eliot calls the greatest sin: to do the right thing for the wrong reason. View quote
Brennan Manning
L i g h t . . . light, wrote T. S. Eliot, visible reminder of invisible light. View quote
Marilyn Ferguson
All my brother Eliot and I did as kids was film sketches. View quote
Ilana Glazer
My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her. (Jacob Rothschild)
What's that line from TS Eliot? To arrive at the place where you started, but to know it for the first time. I'm able to write about a breakup from a different place. Same brokenness. Same rock-bottom. But a little more informed, now I'm older. Thank God for growing up. View quote
Alanis Morissette
I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas. View quote
Dennis Gabor
Tolkien's work has very little of interest in it to a reader of literature, in my opinion. When I think of literature - Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad - the great novelists found their subject matter in human nature, emotion, in the ways we relate to each other. If that's what Tolkien's up to, he's left out half of it. View quote
Philip Pullman
Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year. View quote
Paul Muldoon