The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (152 page)
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Authors: Elizabeth Knowles
1819–80
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
Daniel Deronda
(1876) bk. 2, ch. 15
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
Felix Holt
(1866) ch. 5
A woman can hardly ever choose…she is dependent on what happens to her. She must take meaner things, because only meaner things are within her reach.
Felix Holt
(1866) ch. 27
Debasing the moral currency.
The Impressions of Theophrastus Such
(1879) essay title
He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination.
Middlemarch
(1871–2) bk. 1, ch. 9
Fred's studies are not very deep…he is only reading a novel.
Middlemarch
(1871–2) bk 1, ch. 11
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
Middlemarch
(1871–2) bk. 2, ch. 20
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
The Mill on the Floss
(1860) bk. 1, ch. 10
The dead level of provincial existence.
The Mill on the Floss
(1860) bk. 5, ch. 3
"Character" says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms—"character is destiny."
The Mill on the Floss
(1860) bk. 6, ch. 6
1888–1965
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn.
Ash-Wednesday
(1930) pt. 1
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
Ash-Wednesday
(1930) pt. 1
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day.
Ash-Wednesday
(1930) pt. 2
What is hell?
Hell is oneself,
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
The Cocktail Party
(1950) act 1, sc. 3.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
Four Quartets
"Burnt Norton" (1936) pt. 1
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Four Quartets
"Burnt Norton" (1936) pt. 1
Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Four Quartets
"Burnt Norton" (1936) pt. 1.
At the still point of the turning world.
Four Quartets
"Burnt Norton" (1936) pt. 2
In my beginning is my end.
Four Quartets
"East Coker" (1940) pt. 1.
The intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings.
Four Quartets
"East Coker" (1940) pt. 2
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.
Four Quartets
"East Coker" (1940) pt. 2
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.
Four Quartets
"East Coker" (1940) pt. 3
I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable.
Four Quartets
"The Dry Salvages" (1941) pt. 1
Speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe.
Four Quartets
"Little Gidding" (1942) pt. 2
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
Four Quartets
"Little Gidding" (1942) pt. 5
So, while the light fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.
Four Quartets
"Little Gidding" (1942) pt. 5
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Four Quartets
"Little Gidding" (1942) pt. 5.
Here I am, an old man in a dry month
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
"Gerontion" (1920)
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
"Gerontion" (1920)
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
"Gerontion" (1920)
We are the hollow men.
"The Hollow Men" (1925)
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
"The Hollow Men" (1925)
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
"The Hollow Men" (1925)
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
"Journey of the Magi" (1927).
An alien people clutching their gods.
"Journey of the Magi" (1927)
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917)
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917)
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917)
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917)
I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917)
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917).
Yet we have gone on living,
Living and partly living.
Murder in the Cathedral
(1935) pt. 1
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
Murder in the Cathedral
(1935) pt. 1
He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:
At whatever time the deed took place—
macavity wasn't there!
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
(1939) "Macavity: the Mystery Cat"
I gotta use words when I talk to you.
Sweeney Agonistes
(1932) "Fragment of an Agon"
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
"Sweeney among the Nightingales" (1919)
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land.
The Waste Land
(1922) pt. 1
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
The Waste Land
(1922) pt. 1
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble.
The Waste Land
(1922) pt. 2.
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.
The Waste Land
(1922) pt. 2.
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
The Waste Land
(1922) pt. 2
o o o o
that Shakespeherian Rag—
It's so elegant
So intelligent.
The Waste Land
(1922) pt. 2.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water.
The Waste Land
(1922) pt. 3.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs.
The Waste Land
(1922) pt. 3
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
The Waste Land
(1922) pt. 3.
Shantih, shantih, shantih.
The Waste Land
(1922) closing words.
Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin.
"Whispers of Immortality" (1919)
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
The Sacred Wood
(1920) "Philip Massinger"
In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was due to the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.
Selected Essays
(1932) "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921)