W. H. Auden Quotes
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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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Lines 10–16
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Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them - the one, in fact, which is not a mask.
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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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A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign.
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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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Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
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Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
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It's 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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Every day America's destroyed and re-created,America is what you do,America is I and you,America is what you choose to make it.
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone. Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
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The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.
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God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
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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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When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
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Now is the age of anxiety.
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Lay your sleeping head, my love Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral; But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie: Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful.
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Let us then Consider rather the incessant Now of The traveler through time, his tired mind Biased towards bigness since his body must Exaggerate to exist, possessed by hope...
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Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded.
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But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
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'O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.'The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.'
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One can only blaspheme if one believes.