"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable—
And therefore the fittest for renunciation."

The Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages, Part II

"Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men."

The Hollow Men

"And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me."

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"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."

The Four Quartets, No. III: The Dry Salvages

"And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and way?
And how should I presume?"

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal."

The Four Quartets, No. I: Burnt Norton

"Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present."

The Four Quartets, No. I: Burnt Norton

"And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—"

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound