Quotes By W. H. Auden

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

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

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

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

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.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

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.

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.

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.

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

No hero is mortal till he dies.