Quotes from W.H. Auden

To be free is often to be lonely.

Were all stars to disappear and die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time. —W. H. Auden, "The More Loving One

In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.

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.

So I wish you first a Sense of theatre; only Those who love illusion And know it will go far: Otherwise we spend our Lives in a confusion Of what we say and do with Who we really are.

Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.

But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time

A fairy tale...on the other hand, demands of the reader total surrender; so long as he is in its world, there must be for him no other.

The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.

Some thirty inches from my nose The frontier of my Person goes, And all the untilled air between Is private pagus or demesne. Stranger, unless with bedroom eyes I beckon you to fraternize, Beware of rudely crossing it: I have no gun, but I can spit.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

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.

Nature and Passion are powerful, but they are also full of grief. True happiness would have the calm and order of bourgeois routine without its utilitarian ignobility and boredom.

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.

An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.

Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.

In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

Although you be, as I am, one of those Who feel a Christian ought to write in prose, For poetry is magic: born in sin, you May read it to exorcies the Gentile in you.

Human "nature" is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before.

The world needs a wash and a week's rest.

Small tyrants, threatened by big, sincerely believe they love liberty.

We have no destiny assigned us: Nothing is certain but the body; we plan To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us Of the equality of man.