I’m getting super-swoony reading contextless T. S. Eliot quotes. These are so good, I have to make a collage of quotes right now, and maybe this can provide them a context.

“It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.”

“We had the experience, but we missed the meaning.”

“Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

“In order to possess what you do not possess / You must go by the way of dispossession.”

“There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.”

“Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.”

“There is no method but to be very intelligent.”

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.”

“No poet, no artist of any sort, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”

“The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

“Artistic inevitability lies in the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion.”

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

“The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.”