Eliot Quotes - Page 3

• I had not read George Eliot, so read a few. I felt ashamed I hadn't read "Middlemarch" before.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Ashamed, Middlemarch, Felt

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• George Eliot is my only steady girlfriend. We go to bed together every night.

  Peter O'Toole

  Girlfriend, Night, Together

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• I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

  Sylvia Plath

  Writing, Thinking, Knowing

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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• Always in England if you had the type of brain that was capable of understanding T.S. Eliot's poetry or Kant's logic, you could be sure of finding large numbers of people who would hate you violently.

  D. J. Taylor

  Hate, Numbers, People

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• I would like to work with Paul McCartney in the future. Or Brian Seltzer. But I guess like, like I said - I'm into The Strokes, like Ben Folds, Eliot Smith, the Beatles are my favorite, the Beach Boys, Queen.

  Drake Bell

  Beach, Queens, Boys

  Source: www.thestarscoop.com

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• As I've gotten older I've become a devotee of 19th-century authors, such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot.

  David Duchovny

  Century, Dickens, Devotee

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• Pound was silly, bumptious, extravagantly generous, annoying, exhibitionistic; Eliot was sensible, cautious, retiring, soothing, shy. Though Pound wrote some brilliant passages, on the whole he was a failure as a poet (sometimes even in his own estimation); Eliot went from success to success and is still quoted--and misquoted--by thousands of people who have never read him. Both men were expatriates by choice, but Eliot renounced his American citizenship and did his best to become assimilated with his fellow British subjects, while Pound always remained an American in exile.

  T.S. Mathews

  Silly, Men, People

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• Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

  Robert Morgan

  Chinese, Important, Pounds

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• T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti

  Book, House, Generations

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. December 1, 2012.

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• The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velázquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art.

  Lucian Freud

  Art, Character, Thinking

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• I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshman students:'All the literature we read this term was depressing.' How naive. How sane.

  Mary Rose O'Reilley

  Depressing, Gone, Fiction

  Mary Rose O'Reilley (2014). “The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd”, p.14, Milkweed Editions

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• I don't know if I call myself a poet or not. I would like to, but I'm not really qualified to make that decision, because I come in on such a back door, that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a [John] Keats or a T.S. Eliot would really think of my stuff.

  Bob Dylan

  Thinking, Doors, Decision

  Source: www.rightwingbob.com

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• The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action.

  Russell Kirk

  Art, Book, Taken

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• Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings.

  Sidney Hook

  Philosophical, Writing, Color

  Sidney Hook (1987). “Out of step: an unquiet life in the 20th century”, Harpercollins

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• Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.

  Harold Bloom

  Wise, Book, Reading

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• Pound had argued - and Eliot had helped him prove - that a poem could be sustained by memorable moments. Olson proved that it could be sustained by unmemorable ones, provided that the texture of the accumulated jottings avoided the sound of failed poetry.

  Clive James

  Memorable, Poetry, Sound

  Clive James (2014). “Poetry Notebook: 2006–2014”, p.10, Pan Macmillan

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• 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.

  Brennan Manning

  Christian, Ice Cream, Self

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• I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Powerful, Stupid, School

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• 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.

  Alanis Morissette

  Moving On, Break Up, Breakup

  "'I've been a thorn in people's sides just by existing'". Interview with Lucy O'Brien, www.theguardian.com. May 21, 2008.

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• It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.

  David Nicholls

  Song, Falling In Love, Book

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• Most people think that George Nelson, Charles Eames and Eliot Noyes invented industrial design. That is, of course, an exaggeration. George did it without any assistance from the other two.

  Bill N. Lacy

  Thinking, Two, People

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