Quotes & Sayings About Auden

The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow. — W. H. Auden

Sometimes a question can hurt more than an answer. — Sarah Dessen

I mentioned early in this book the kind of rereading distinctive of a fan
the Tolkien addict, say, or the devotee of Jane Austen or Trollope or the Harry Potter books. The return to such books is often motivated by a desire to dwell for a time in a self-contained fictional universe, with its own boundaries and its own rules. (It is a moot question whether Austen and Trollope's first readers were drawn to their novels for these reasons, but their readers today often are.) Such rereading is not purely a matter of escapism, even though that is one reason for its attraction: we should note that it's not what readers are escaping from but that they are escaping into that counts most. Most of us do not find fictional worlds appealing because we find our own lives despicable, though censorious people often make that assumption. Auden once wrote that "there must always be ... escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep." The sleeper does not disdain consciousness. — Alan Jacobs

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation, And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had everything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. — W. H. Auden

Three quarters of these people know
Instinctively what ought to be
The nature of society
And how they'd live there if they could.
If it were easy to be good,
And cheap, and plain as evil, how,
We all would be its members now... — W. H. Auden

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation. — W. H. Auden

Composing mortals with immortal fire. — W. H. Auden

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

Love each other or perish — W. H. Auden

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading. — W. H. Auden

Oh dear white children, casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words. — W. H. Auden

To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star. — W. H. Auden

An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse. — W. H. Auden

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in. — W. H. Auden

And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie. — W. H. Auden

Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear. — W. H. Auden

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good. — W. H. Auden

There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either. — Randall Jarrell

Water is the soul of the Earth. — W. H. Auden

Hollis " I said "you're messing with me right now aren't you You're in Paris or somewhere and just-"
"What " he replied. "No This is the real deal. Here I'll prove it."
There was a muffled noise followed by some static. Then I heard my mother recite at a distance in her most droll flat tone "Yes. It is true. Your brother is in love and in my kitchen. — Sarah Dessen

O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed. — W. H. Auden

Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest. — W. H. Auden

May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us? — W. H. Auden

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use
high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject
there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical. — Richard Rodriguez

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. — W. H. Auden

If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try. — W. H. Auden

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen. — Carol Ann Duffy

Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. — W. H. Auden

For time is inches
And the heart's changes,
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted. — W. H. Auden

Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond. — W. H. Auden

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something. — W. H. Auden

Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life. — W. H. Auden

For the others, like me, there is only the flash
Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one
Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass
To meet one's madness — W. H. Auden

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. — W. H. Auden

A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true. — W. H. Auden

Whoever the searchlights catch,
Whatever the loudspeakers blare,
We are not to despair. — W. H. Auden

The passageway smelled like decaying bodies and lavender. Her nose found it entertaining. The rocky tunnel ate their footsteps. Camin Barice wanted it to steal their voices. Then, she wouldn't have to listen to the aggravating filth spilling from her charges holes. — Auden Johnson

The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions. — W. H. Auden

Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate. — W. H. Auden

Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition. — W. H. Auden

What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts? — W. H. Auden

Do you know who W.H. Auden was, Mr. Iscariot? W.H. Auden was a poet who once said, "God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame reciting by heart the poems you would have written had your life been good" ... She was my poem, Mr. Iscariot. Her and the kids. But mostly her. You cashed in for silver, Mr. Iscariot. But me? Me ... I threw away gold. That's a fact. That's a natural fact. — Stephen Adly Guirgis

The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: "For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages," what just reason could he give for refusing? — W. H. Auden

To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal. — W. H. Auden

Thoughts on his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic. — W. H. Auden

Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral — W. H. Auden

Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking. — W. H. Auden

You've clearly been charged with hiring a jack-of-all-trades. And Dr. Auden is that mythical creature you seek: fully qualified to teach British and American literature, women's studies, composition, creative writing, intermediate parasailing, advanced sword swallowing, and subcategories and permutations of the above. — Julie Schumacher

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. — W. H. Auden

Accurate scholarship can
unearth the whole offence
from luther untill noe
that has driven a culture mad.
From what occured at linz
what huge imago made
a psychopathic god.
i and the public know
what all schoolchildren learn
those to whom evil is done
do evil in return. — W. H. Auden

The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself. — W. H. Auden

It's a pity I am so impatient and careless, as any ordinary person could learn all the techniques of photography in a week. It is the democratic art, i.e. technical skill is practically eliminated - the more foolproof cameras become with focusing and exposure gadgets the better - and artistic quality depends only on choice of subject. — W. H. Auden

Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known; They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone. — W. H. Auden

Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease. — W. H. Auden

What he felt during his Spanish encounter with left-wing anti-Christianity was similar to his reactions to the anti-Christianity of the right. The "novelty and shock of the Nazis", Auden wrote, and the blitheness with which Hitler's acolytes dismissed Christianity "on the grounds that to love one's neighbor as oneself was a command fit only for effeminate weaklings", pushed him inexorably toward unavoidable questions. "If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?" The answer to this question, he wrote later, was part of what "brought me back to the church. — Ross Douthat

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel. — W. H. Auden

He wanted to know if the master sergeant had read Auden, the twentieth century's most influential Christian poet, "English majors in the army, not many of them, not many of us, am I right, Top." Burnette, nonplussed, wondered if he should mention Eliot or the eccentric religious impulses of JD Salinger, but instead mumbled the only line he could recall from Auden's work, "We must love one another or die." Bingo, said the colonel. Son of a bitch had the wrong conjunction. — Bob Shacochis

Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead. — W. H. Auden

My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer'; 'I'm sorry, not yet. — W. H. Auden

Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer's block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I'm projecting here. — Nick Cave

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell. — W. H. Auden

The best guide I know to readerly judgment is our old friend Auden, who graciously summed up a lifetime of thinking about these matters in a single incisive sentence: For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don't like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it. — Alan Jacobs

History marches to the drum of a clear idea. — W. H. Auden

A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane. — W. H. Auden

Of course Sartre and Beauvoir were not alone in being seduced by Communism. Many of the Auden generation, on both sides of the Channel, had become infatuated with the socialist 'paradise', and remained blind to its atrocities. — Carole Seymour-Jones

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people. — W. H. Auden

Swans in the winter air
A white perfection have — W. H. Auden

I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. — J. Courtney Sullivan

Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say — W. H. Auden

Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. — W. H. Auden

I may want to sleep with Miss America, but I have no wish to hear her talk about herself and her family. — W. H. Auden

Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done. — W. H. Auden

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. — W. H. Auden

The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again. — W. H. Auden

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings. — W. H. Auden

I trailed off and he didn't push me to finish. I was finding that I liked that. — Sarah Dessen

All that we are not stares back at what we are. — W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is
and always will be
ourselves. — Ian Mortimer

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

How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. — W. H. Auden

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) — W. H. Auden

A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends. — W. H. Auden

The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had. — Sylvia Plath

She survived whatever happened;
she forgave; she became. — W. H. Auden

The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is. — W. H. Auden

Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy. — W. H. Auden

A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere. — W. H. Auden

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

Alone, alone, about the dreadful wood / Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, / Dreading to find its Father. — W. H. Auden

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look. — W. H. Auden

Look, rodent." At least she could still talk.. "Either chop off my ears so I'm not subjected to your verbal projectiles or clench your back passage so you'd stop dumping toxic waste. — Auden Johnson

Lust is less a physical need than a way of forgetting time and death. — W. H. Auden

The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish. — W. H. Auden

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

No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him. — W. H. Auden

One cannot review a bad book without showing off. — W. H. Auden

When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won. — W. H. Auden

I didn't intend to write about totems or people searching. I tried not to constrain myself, and this is what I ended up with. There's this great Auden quote: "I look at what I write so I can see what I think." — Jonathan Safran Foer

We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is
beyond me. — W. H. Auden

But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry. — W. H. Auden