Life & Mortality Quote by T. S. Eliot

Eliot lands this line like a cold coin on a table: flat, final, impossible to ignore. The shock isn’t in the imagery (birth, death) but in the pivot of belief. “Had thought they were different” is doing the real work. It’s a confession of a worldview collapsing mid-sentence, the moment when the tidy categories that organize a life - beginnings over here, endings over there - stop holding.

The intent is less to be mystical than diagnostic. Eliot is registering modern consciousness under strain: after war, after spiritual depletion, after the daily evidence that the body’s “start” and “stop” are entangled with suffering, fear, and repetition. Birth isn’t automatically a clean dawn; death isn’t a single dramatic curtain. Each can feel like the other: an expulsion, a rupture, a crossing into dependency, a loss of self. The line suggests that what we call “new life” already contains a kind of dying (of the mother’s autonomy, of innocence, of the old self), and what we call “death” can resemble a grim delivery into whatever comes next - or into nothing.

Subtext: Eliot’s signature dread of hollow ritual and broken meaning. The speaker has “seen” the raw events, but the experience hasn’t granted clarity; it has erased distinctions. That’s quintessential Eliot: perception doesn’t redeem, it corrodes. The grammar is plain, almost reportorial, which makes the metaphysical punch sharper. He refuses consolation, and the refusal feels like the point.