Quotes By W. H. Auden

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.

Art is born of humiliation.

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.

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

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

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

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

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.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

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

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.

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

Now is the age of anxiety.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

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

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.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

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.

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.

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.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

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

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.

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.