W. H. Auden Quotes

All I have is a voice.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

Lovers of small numbers go benignly potty,
Believe all tales are thirteen chapters long,
Have animal doubles, carry pentagrams,
Are Millerites, Baconians, Flat-Earth-Men.

Lovers of big numbers go horribly mad,
would have the Swiss abolished, all of us
Well-purged, somatotyped, baptised, taught baseball:
They empty bars, spoil parties, run for Congress.

a culture is no better than its woods

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

The wolves will get you if the moths won't.

When I consider others I can easily believe that their bodies express their personalities and that the two are inseparable. But it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

To be free is often to be lonely.

The mystics themselves do not seem to have believed their physical and mental sufferings to be a sign of grace, but it is unfortunate that it is precisely physical manifestations which appeal most to the religiosity of the mob. A woman might spend twenty years nursing lepers without having any notice taken of her, but let her once exhibit the stigmata or live for long periods on nothing but the Host and water, and in no time the crowd will be clamoring for her beatification.

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.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

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

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.