W. H. Auden Quotes
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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
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Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
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Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
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The trees encountered on a country stroll Reveal a lot about that country's soul ... A culture is no better than its woods.
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The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
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It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
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The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
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A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
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Put the car away; when life fails What's the good of going to Wales? Here am I, here are you: But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
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The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
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Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
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We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
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I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.
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All that we are not stares back at what we are.
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When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
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In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
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If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.
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The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
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Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
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No hero is mortal till he dies.
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I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.
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The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.