We have here the peculiarly American way of digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending.

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

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

We who were living are now dying With a little patience.

We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow

Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow

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

And always I was to be punished for my sins by my sins themselves, and to realize, at least obscurely, that I was being so punished and burn in the flames of my own hell, and rot in the hell of my own corrupt will until I was forced at last, by my own intense misery, to give up my own will.

We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of certainty or happiness.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."

"Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps."