“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.”
W. H. Auden3 likes
“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.”
“Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
“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.”
“History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”
“Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”
“Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”
“In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.”
“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.”
“It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.”
“We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.”
“We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.”
“Any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate.”
“No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.”
“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.”
“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.”
“Learn from your dreams what you lack.”
“God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.”
“To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.”
“Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.”
“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.”
“If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.”
“If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.”
“Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.”
“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.”
“Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.”
“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.”
“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”
“A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.”
“Art is born of humiliation.”
“Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.”
“A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.”
“Now is the age of anxiety.”
“Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.”
“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 triumph.”
“A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
“All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.”
“'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'”
“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
“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.”