W. H. Auden Quotes

Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse’s flowers will not last, Nurses to their graves are gone, But the prams go rolling on.

I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.

All I have is a voice.

My second thoughts condemn
And wonder how I dare
To look you in the eye.
What right have I to swear
Even at one a.m.
To love you till I die?

Earth meets too many crimes
For fibs to interest her;
If I can give my word,
Forgiveness can recur
Any number of times
In Time. Which is absurd.

Tempus fugit. Quite.
So finish up your drink.
All flesh is grass. It is.
But who on earth can think
With heavy heart or light
Of what will come of this?

Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;
Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part.
They taught me to express my deep abhorrence
If I caught anyone preferring Art
To Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart.
I lived with crooks but seldom was molested;
The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.

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

The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

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

Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.

The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.

In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don't think that art that is alive can remain on the same level of interest throughout — and the same is true of life.

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

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