W. H. Auden

“He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”

“We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.”

“When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.”

“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?”

“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”

“When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.”

“The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.”

“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”

“In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.”

“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”

“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.”

“Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.”

“No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.”

“It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.”

“If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.”

“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”

“'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'”

“No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.”

“Art is born of humiliation.”

“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.”

“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”

“Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.”

“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.”

“A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.”

“Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.”

“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

“In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.”

“A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.”

“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.”

“Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”

“The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.”

“Learn from your dreams what you lack.”

“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 wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”

“Choice of attention, to pay attention to this and ignore that, is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer.”

“Choice of attention ... 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.”

“Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.”

“If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.”

“It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is, rightly, more important that he eat than that he philosophize.”

“To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.”

“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.”

“Any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.”

“About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; How well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

“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 practising it.”

“Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.”

“All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall; And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.”

“Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.”

“The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.”

“Man is a tempted being, living with what he does and suffers in time, the medium in which he realizes his potential character. The indeterminacy of time means that events never happen once and for all. The good may fall, the bad may repent, and suffering can be, not a simple retribution, but a trium...”

“There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.”

“The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.”

“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”

“We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.”

“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.”

“History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”

“Now is the age of anxiety.”

“Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”

“One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.”

“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”

“Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.”

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”

“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”

“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.”

“God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.”

“A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.”