Some Auden quotes for the grey winter daze: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.
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.
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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.
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
Who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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.
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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.
Art is born of humiliation.
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.
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
Learn from your dreams what you lack.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
No hero is mortal till he dies.
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.
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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.
Now is the age of anxiety.
1 comment:
Feliz Cumple, Wystan H.
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