W. H. Auden Quotes
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Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
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You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
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Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
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A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
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In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.
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We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die.
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One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
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A crowd of ordinary decent folk Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground.
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The poet who writes 'free' verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
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The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
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In the late Middle Ages there were, no doubt, many persons in monasteries and convents who had no business there and should have been out in the world earning an honest living, but today it may very well be that there are many persons trying to earn a living in the world and driven by failure into mental homes whose true home would be the cloister.
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Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
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Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
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The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
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The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.
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A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
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It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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Now is the age of anxiety.
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Look, stranger, on this island now The leaping light for your delight discovers, Stand stable here And silent be, That through the channels of the ear May wander like a river The swaying sound of the sea.
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Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last; Nurses to their graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.
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Let us honour if we canThe vertical manThough we value noneBut the horizontal one.
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August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.
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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
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The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good.