W H Auden Quotes
'A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.'
'A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.'
'A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.'
'A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.'
'A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become'
'All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.'
'All that we are not stares back at what we are.'
'Art is born of humiliation.'
'Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.'
'Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.'
'Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.'
'Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.'
'Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.'
'Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.'
'If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.'
'In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.'
'It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.'
'Learn from your dreams what you lack.'
'Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.'
'Music is the best means we have of digesting time.'
'My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.'
'Now is the age of anxiety.'
'Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.'
'We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.'
'You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at.'
'Five minutes on even the nicest mountain is awfully long'
Born in York, North Yorkshire
More about W H Auden
Links:
http://audensociety.org/ The Auden Society
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