I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t even wish to be something.

The Waste Land is an American self-elegy masking as a mythological romance, a romantic crisis poem pretending to be an exercise in Christian Irony.

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself,

Up to the moment of the yellow sunset,

Un sauce de cristal, un chopo de agua,

Del aire al aire, como una red vacía,

The old pond-
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.

When Crow cried his mother's ear
Scorched to a stump.

As from my childhood,...

Too old to carry arms and fight like the others -

Autumn is eating a leaf from my hand: we are friends.

Spring lies desolate.
The velvet-dark ditch

Μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατον
σπεῦδε, τὰν δ’ ἔμπρακτον ἄντλει μαχανάν.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

As Parmigianino did it, the right handBigger than the head, thrust at the viewerAnd swerving easily away, as though to protectWhat it advertises. A few leaded p

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.

(Award ceremony speech) Presentation Speech by Professor Anders Olsson, Member of the Swedish Academy, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature

Respectable Mr President,

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -

so much depends
upon

In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris
Rainer Maria Rilke

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Nobel Prize laureate in literature for this year bears a name of unusual sound, which he chose at first to protect himself from the curious.