Eliot

"Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. it cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor" (1582)

"This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered...

the confused cries of the newspaper critics (1583)

The emotion of art is impersonal.

And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

"Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!' / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / swaddled with darkness."

"This: were we led all that way for / Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, / We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us. like Death, our death, / We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensations, / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I should be glad of another death"

"Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable."

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is"

"To be conscious is not to be in time"

"Will the sunflower turn to us"

"Words move, music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / Can only die. Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence. ONly by the form, the oattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness"