Quotes from W.H. Auden

Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, silently and very fast.

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

We are, for all our polish, of little stature, and, as human lives, compared with authentic martyrs, of no account.

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

When I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

O dear white children casual as birds, Playing among the ruined languages, So small beside their large confusing words, So gay against the greater silences Of dreadful things you did…

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor , Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

The underlying reason for writing is to bridge the gulf between one person and another.

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings..

This Lunar Beauty This lunar beauty Has no history, Is complete and early; If beauty later Bear any feature It had a lover And is another. This like a dream Keeps other time, And daytime is The loss of this; For time is inches And the heart's changes Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted. But this was never A ghost's endeavour Nor, finished this, Was ghost at ease; And till it pass Love shall not near The sweetness here Nor sorrow take His endless look.

I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man, A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire. 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

O dear white children casual as birds, Playing among the ruined languages, So small beside their large confusing words, So gay against the greater silences Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head, Impetuous child with the tremendous brain, O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain, Lost innocence who wished your lover dead, Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

Sorry, my dear, one mustn't be bohemian!

Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.

Just as a good man forgets his deed the moment he has done it, a genuine writer forgets a work as soon as he has completed it and starts to think about the next one; if he thinks about his past work at all, he is more likely to remember its faults than its virtues. Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.

There is a difference between a villain and one who simply commits a crime. The villain is an extremely conscious person and commits a crim consciously, for its own sake.

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

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 for ever: 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.

As his wife, Emilia must know Iago better than anybody else. She does not know, any more than the others, that he is malevolent, but she does know that her husband is addicted to practical jokes. What Shakespeare gives us in Iago is a portrait of a practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind, and perhaps the best way of approaching the play is by a general consideration of the Practical Joker.

Here am I, Here are you: but what does it mean? What are we going to do?

Thou shalt not live within thy means Nor on plain water and raw greens. If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd; Read The New Yorker, trust in God; And take short views.

Let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.

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.