The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart;… - W. H. Auden

For the error bred in the bone of each woman and each man craves what it cannot have, not universal love but to be loved alone.

The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish.

For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.

Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.

In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.