Top 100 Auden's Quotes
#1. In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
Stephen Greenblatt
#2. The winds must come from somewhere when they blow ... There must be reasons why the leaves decay.
(From Auden's If I Could Tell You
Alexander McCall Smith
#3. I'm trying to create a collection of stories - the 'U.F.O.W.A.V.E.' songs are all stories. I haven't really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden's poems when I was younger, and the imagery really interested me.
King Krule
#4. There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, 'Did you get an erection?' If the answer is 'Yes' from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.
W. H. Auden
#5. Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life
W. H. Auden
#6. A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
W. H. Auden
#7. 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
#8. There are three cardinal rules - don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.
W. H. Auden
#9. Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.
W. H. Auden
#10. And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
W. H. Auden
#11. The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach: The Ogre cannot master speech. About a subjugated plain, Among it's desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.
W. H. Auden
#12. For time is inches
And the heart's changes,
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.
W. H. Auden
#13. Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
W. H. Auden
#14. This thought was interrupted, suddenly, by a crash from the front entrance. We all looked over just in time to see Adam bending back from the glass, rubbing his arm.
"Pull open," Maggie called out. As Leah rolled her eyes, she said, "He never remembers. It's so weird.
Sarah Dessen
#15. It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.
W. H. Auden
#16. In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning ... In life the loser's score is always zero.
W. H. Auden
#17. To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith
W. H. Auden
#18. To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
W. H. Auden
#19. Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.
W. H. Auden
#20. The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
W. H. Auden
#21. The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
W. H. Auden
#22. Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
W. H. Auden
#23. Knowledge may have its purposes,
but guessing is always
more fun than knowing.
W. H. Auden
#24. The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
W. H. Auden
#26. Beloved, we are always in the wrong, Handling so clumsily our stupid lives, Suffering too little or too long, Too careful even in our selfish loves: The decorative manias we obey Die in grimaces round us every day, Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice Which utters an absurd command - Rejoice.
W. H. Auden
#27. As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
W. H. Auden
#28. The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead.
Michael Jackson
#29. Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last, Nurses to their graves are gone, But the prams go rolling on.
W. H. Auden
#30. What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
W. H. Auden
#31. Does this current deterioration and corruption of language, imprecision of thought, and so forth scare you - or is it just a decadent phase?
AUDEN
It terrifies me. I try by my personal example to fight it; as I say, it's a poet's role to maintain the sacredness of language.
W. H. Auden
#32. We till shadowed days are done,
We must weep and sing
Duty's conscious wrong,
The Devil in the clock
W. H. Auden
#33. It was so risky and so scary, and yet at the same time, so beautiful. Maybe the truth was, it shouldn't be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth.
Sarah Dessen
#34. The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.
W. H. Auden
#35. 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
#36. I'm always amazed at the American practice of allowing one party to a homosexual act to remain passive
it's so undemocratic. Sexmust be mutual.
W. H. Auden
#37. 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
#38. It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
W. H. Auden
#39. It was like reaching for someone's hand, then missing their fingers, or even their arm, and hitting their shoulder instead. But no matter. You hang on tight anyway.
Sarah Dessen
#40. There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.
W. H. Auden
#41. There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.
W. H. Auden
#42. T. S. Eliot told Auden tht the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead.
Howard Jacobson
#43. Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.
W. H. Auden
#44. Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts.
W. H. Auden
#45. Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded.
W. H. Auden
#46. 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
#47. It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
W. H. Auden
#48. A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
W. H. Auden
#49. It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940.
W. H. Auden
#50. In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.
W. H. Auden
#51. Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes i do not like my work
On a pink official form.
W. H. Auden
#52. In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
W. H. Auden
#53. Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.
W. H. Auden
#54. We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
W. H. Auden
#55. To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
W. H. Auden
#56. Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.
W. H. Auden
#57. It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
W. H. Auden
#58. About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
W. H. Auden
#59. All we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. Auden
#60. Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.
W. H. Auden
#61. Lust is less a physical need than a way of forgetting time and death.
W. H. Auden
#62. The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
W. H. Auden
#63. Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
W. H. Auden
#64. Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.
Cynthia Ozick
#65. The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.
W. H. Auden
#66. 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
#67. One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. Auden
#68. The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
W. H. Auden
#69. Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire; Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.
W. H. Auden
#70. 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.
W. H. Auden
#71. I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.
W. H. Auden
#72. I trailed off and he didn't push me to finish. I was finding that I liked that.
Sarah Dessen
#73. The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they've realised they can't get away with it.
W. H. Auden
#74. Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
W. H. Auden
#75. 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
#76. 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.
W. H. Auden
#77. 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
#78. The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake;
W. H. Auden
#79. As W.H. Auden pointed out, the Reaper takes the rolling in money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung. But that isn't where Auden starts his list. He starts with the innocent young.
Stephen King
#80. The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent.
Christopher Hitchens
#81. John and I noticed that whenever we talked about our children Wystan reached for his cats.
Thekla Clark
#82. I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.
Stevie Smith
#83. Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.
W. H. Auden
#84. 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.
W. H. Auden
#85. Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won't believe again in their own size.
W. H. Auden
#86. An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
W. H. Auden
#87. Whoever the searchlights catch,
Whatever the loudspeakers blare,
We are not to despair.
W. H. Auden
#88. One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
W. H. Auden
#89. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. Auden
#90. O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.
W. H. Auden
#91. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
W. H. Auden
#92. 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
#93. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
W. H. Auden
#94. Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
W. H. Auden
#95. Enormous novels by co-eds.
Rain down on our defenceless heads. Till our teeth chatter.
W. H. Auden
#96. With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse
W. H. Auden
#97. How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.
W. H. Auden
#98. 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
#99. Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
W. H. Auden
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
