W. H. Auden Quotes
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Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
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Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
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If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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The thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away, Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay At what the god had wrought To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Who would not live long.
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The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
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Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
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Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.
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Learn from your dreams what you lack.
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Art is born of humiliation.
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
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Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
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Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
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I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
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Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
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The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish.
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
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All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
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History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
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Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.
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I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
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The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.