The Four Quartets Quotes and Quotation

East Coker (1940)

• In my beginning is my end. (I)

• There is, it seems to us,
  At best, only a limited value
  In the knowledge derived from experience.
  The knowledge inposes a pattern, and falsifies,
  For the pattern is new in every moment
  And every moment is a new and shocking
  Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
  Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm. (II)

• Do not let me hear
  Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
  Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
  Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
  The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
  Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. (II)

• O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
  The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
  …
  And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
  Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury. (III)

• I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
  For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
  For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
  But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
  Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
  So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. (III)

• You say I am repeating
  Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
  Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
  To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
  In order to arrive at what you do not know
  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
  In order to possess what you do not possess
  You must go by the way of dispossession.
  In order to arrive at what you are not
  You must go through the way in which you are not.
  And what you do not know is the only thing you know
  And what you own is what you do not own
  And where you are is where you are not. (III)

• Trying to use words, and every attempt
  Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
  Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
  For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
  One is no longer disposed to say it. (V)

• And so each venture
  Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
  With shabby equipment always deteriorating
  In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
  Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
  By strength and submission, has already been discovered
  Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
  To emulate —but there is no competition—
  There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
  And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
  That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
  For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. (V)

• Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
  the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
  Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
  Isolated, with no before and after,
  But a lifetime burning in every moment
  And not the lifetime of one man only
  But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. (V)

• Love is most nearly itself
  When here and now cease to matter.
  Old men ought to be explorers
  Here or there does not matter
  We must be still and still moving
  Into another intensity
  For a further union, a deeper communion
  Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
  The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
  Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. (V)

The Dry Salvages (1941)

• I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
  Is a strong brown god —sullen, untamed and intractable,
  Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
  Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
  Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. (I)

• The river is within us, the sea is all about us (I)

• The sea has many voices,
  Many gods and many voices. (I)

• It seems, as one becomes older,
  That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
  Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
  Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
  Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past. (II)

• The moments of happiness —not the sense of well-being,
  Fruition, fulfilment, security or affecton,
  Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
  We had the experience but missed the meaning,
  And approach to the meaning restores the experience
  In a different form, beyond any meaning
  We can assign to happiness. I have said before
  That the past experience revived in the meaning
  Is not the experience of one life only
  But of many generations — not forgetting
  Something that is probably quite ineffable (II)

• Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
  (Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
  Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
  Is not in question) are likewise permanent
  With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
  In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
  Involving ourselves, than in our own.
  For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
  But the torment of others remains an experience
  Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
  People change, and smile: but the agony abides. (II)

• You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
  That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here. (III)

• Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
  Into different lives, or into any future;
  You are not the same people who left that station
  Or who will arrive at any terminus,
  While the narrowing rails slide together behind you (III)

• Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
  You are not those who saw the harbour
  Receding, or those who will disembark.
  Here between the hither and the farther shore
  While time is withdrawn, consider the future
  And the past with an equal mind. (III)

• At the moment which is not of action or inaction
  You can receive this: 'on whatever sphere of being
  The mind of a man may be intent
  At the time of death' — that is the one action
  (And the time of death is every moment)
  Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
  And do not think of the fruit of action.
  Fare forward. (III)

• To apprehend
  The point of intersection of the timeless
  With time, is an occupation for the saint—
  No occupation either, but something given
  And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
  Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender. (V)

• For most of us, there is only the unattended
  Moment, the moment in and out of time,
  The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
  The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
  Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
  That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
  While the music lasts. (V)

• The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
  Here the impossible union
  Of spheres of evidence is actual,
  Here the past and future
  Are conquered, and reconciled… (V)

• Right action is freedom
  From past and future also.
  For most of us, this is the aim
  Never here to be realised;
  Who are only undefeated
  Because we have gone on trying;
  We, content at the last
  If our temporal reversion nourish
  (Not too far from the yew-tree)
  The life of significant soil. (V)

Little Gidding (1942)

• If you came this way,
  Taking the route you would be likely to take
  From the place you would be likely to come from,
  If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
  White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness. (I)

• And what you thought you came for
  Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
  From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
  If at all. Either you had no purpose
  Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
  And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
  Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
  Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
  But this is the nearest, in place and time,
  Now and in England. (I)

• If you came this way,
  Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
  At any time or at any season,
  It would always be the same: you would have to put off
  Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
  Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
  Or carry report. You are here to kneel
  Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
  Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
  Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
  And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
  They can tell you, being dead: the communication
  Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. (I)

• Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
  Is England and nowhere. Never and always. (I)

• Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
  To purify the dialect of the tribe
  And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
  Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
  To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
  First, the cold fricton of expiring sense
  Without enchantment, offering no promise
  But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
  As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
  Second, the conscious impotence of rage
  At human folly, and the laceration
  Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
  And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
  Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
  Of things ill done and done to others' harm
  Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
  Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
  From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
  Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
  Where you must move in measure, like a dancer. (II)

• History may be servitude,
  History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
  The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
  To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
  Sin is Behovely, but
  All shall be well, and
  All manner of thing shall be well. (III)

• We cannot revive old factions
  We cannot restore old policies
  Or follow an antique drum. (III)

• Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
  We have taken from the defeated
  What they had to leave us — a symbol:
  A symbol perfected in death.
  And all shall be well and
  All manner of thing shall be well
  By the purification of the motive
  In the ground of our beseeching. (III)

• The dove descending breaks the air
  With flame of incandescent terror
  Of which the tongues declare
  The one discharge from sin and error.
  The only hope, or else despair
  Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
  To be redeemed from fire by fire. (IV)

• Who then devised the torment? Love.
  Love is the unfamiliar Name
  Behind the hands that wove
  The intolerable shirt of flame
  Which human power cannot remove.
  We only live, only suspire
  Consumed by either fire or fire. (IV)

• What we call the beginning is often the end
  And to make and end is to make a beginning.
  The end is where we start from. (V)

• Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
  Every poem an epitaph. And any action
  Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
  Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
  We die with the dying:
  See, they depart, and we go with them. (V)

• We are born with the dead:
  See, they return, and bring us with them.
  The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
  Are of equal duration. A people without history
  Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
  Of timeless moments. (V)

• So, while the light fails
  On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
  History is now and England. (V)

• With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
  
  We shall not cease from exploration
  And the end of all our exploring
  Will be to arrive where we started
  And know the place for the first time. (V)

• Through the unknown, unremembered gate
  When the last of earth left to discover
  Is that which was the beginning;
  At the source of the longest river
  The voice of the hidden waterfall
  And the children in the apple-tree
  Not known, because not looked for
  But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
  Between two waves of the sea. (V)

• Quick now, here, now, always—
  A condition of complete simplicity
  (Costing not less than everything)
  And all shall be well and
  All manner of thing shall be well
  When the tongues of flames are in-folded
  Into the crowned knot of fire
  And the fire and the rose are one. (V)

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