W. H. Auden Quotes - Page 11

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Drama is based on the Mistake.

W. H. Auden

Mistake, Drama

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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

W. H. Auden

Smell, Doe, Invisible

W.H. Auden (2016). “Canción de cuna y otros poemas”, p.259, DEBOLS!LLO

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Art is born of humiliation.

W. H. Auden

Art, Born, Humiliation

In Stephen Spender World Within World (1951) ch. 2

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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

Ties, Important, Homosexuality

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Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

W. H. Auden

Funny, Science, Simple

A CertainWorld "Behaviorism" (1970)

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I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone says: 'Whom do you write for?' I reply: 'Do you read me?' If they say 'Yes,' I say, 'Do you like it?' If they say 'No,' then I say, 'I don't write for you.'

W. H. Auden

Writing, Trying, You Like It

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We are not commanded (or forbidden) to love our mates, our children, our friends, our country because such affections come naturally to us and are good in themselves, although we may corrupt them. We are commanded to love our neighbor because our natural attitude toward the other is one of either indifference or hostility.

W. H. Auden

Love, Country, Children

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A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.

W. H. Auden

Love, Inspirational, Dream

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In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.

W. H. Auden

Moving, Mean, Men

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Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.

W. H. Auden

Luxury, Soul, Hull

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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

America, Scary, Too Much

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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

W. H. Auden

Rain, Cake, Complaining

Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden (1981). Leonard L. Levinson, in Bartlett's Unfamiliar Quotations (1971), quotes this comment as being said about Auden by someone else.

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Proper names are poetry in the raw.
Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

W. H. Auden

Names, Nicknames

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One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

W. H. Auden

Unique, Reality, Two

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Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

W. H. Auden

Differences, Age, Who We Are

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Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

W. H. Auden

Christmas, Friday, Easter

"Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry". Book by Anthony Hecht, p. 135, 2005.

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You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.

W. H. Auden

Relationship, Beauty, Differences

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There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?

W. H. Auden

Art, Desire, Doe

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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

Cooking, Meteorology, Would Be

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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

W. H. Auden

Evil, Bed, Tables

"Herman Melville" l. 17 (1939)

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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

Fall, Science, Garden

'Look, Stranger!' (1936) no. 1

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As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.

W. H. Auden

Healing, Unjust, Pleasure

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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

Clever, Book, Cooking

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Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.

W. H. Auden

Memories, Faces, Steps

W.H. Auden (2016). “Canción de cuna y otros poemas”, p.35, DEBOLS!LLO

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From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.

W. H. Auden

Taken, Hands, Plot

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W. H. Auden

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Born: February 21, 1907
Died: September 29, 1973
Occupation: Poet
Cite this Page: Citation

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