And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-TS Eliot, Little Gidding
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.
-TS Eliot, East Coker
Since this short span might
well be lived as lives the laurel,deeper in its green than
all other green surrounding,
leaves, edged by wavelets,
smiling like the breeze-
then why, destiny overcome,
must we still be human
and long for further fate?
Not because happiness exists,
that apparent advantage
which barely presages loss.
Not out of curiosity,
nor as an exercise of
such a heart as likewise
in the laurel lies...But
because to be here
means so very much.
Because this fleeting sphere
appears to need us-
in some strange way
concerns us: we...most fleeting of all.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
-William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
-W H Auden, In Memory of WB Yeats
Several extracts from Tennyson's In Memoriam, I wish i could mention them all but there are way too many!
