W. H. Auden Quotes
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Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
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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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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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I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
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All that we are not stares back at what we are.
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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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The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
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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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Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.
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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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Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
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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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No hero is mortal till he dies.
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A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
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All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.