W. H. Auden Quotes - Page 14

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• 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

  Thinking, America, Two

  28 Copy quote

• The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.

  W. H. Auden

  Mother, Father, Taken

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Party, Practice, Homosexuality

  6 Copy quote

• Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

  W. H. Auden

  Responsibility, Aristocracy, Poetic

  "The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays" by W. H. Auden, ("American Poetry"), (p. 367), 1962.

  8 Copy quote

• Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

  W. H. Auden

  Writing, Night, People

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Trying, Essentials, Becoming

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss

  W. H. Auden

  Nature, Moving, Moss

  'The Fall of Rome' (1951)

  95 Copy quote

• The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

  W. H. Auden

  Stars, Heart, Men

  Letter from Iceland (1937, by Auden and MacNeice) "Letter to William Coldstream, Esq."

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Eye, Men, Looks

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, People, Saint

  4 Copy quote

• Intellectual disgrace
  Stares from every human face,
  And the seas of pity lie
  Locked and frozen in each eye.

  W. H. Auden

  Lying, Sadness, Eye

  "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" l. 46 (1940)

  4 Copy quote

• We honor founders of these starving cities,
  Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.

  W. H. Auden

  Cities, Honor, Sorrow

  6 Copy quote

• An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.

  W. H. Auden

  Love Life, Men, Lap

  4 Copy quote

• The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.

  W. H. Auden

  Angle

  4 Copy quote

• Accurate scholarship can
  unearth the whole offence
  from luther untill noe
  that has driven a culture mad.
  From what occured at linz
  what huge imago made
  a psychopathic god.
  i and the public know
  what all schoolchildren learn
  those to whom evil is done
  do evil in return.

  W. H. Auden

  Evil, Mad, Culture

  "September 1, 1939" l. 19 (1939)

  4 Copy quote

• All the literati keep
  An imaginary friend.

  W. H. Auden

  Friendship, Friends, Imaginary Friend

  W. H. Auden, “The Fall Of Rome”

  4 Copy quote

• To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.

  W. H. Auden

  Grateful, Joy, Males

  1972 Of A E Housman.'A Worcestershire Lad', collected in Forewords and After words (1973).

  4 Copy quote

• Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

  W. H. Auden

  Cells, Convinced

  W. H. Auden, “In Memory Of W. B. Yeats”

  4 Copy quote

• Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won't believe again in their own size.

  W. H. Auden

  Believe, Long, Giants

  4 Copy quote

• Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.

  W. H. Auden

  Dance, Children, Ballet

  7 Copy quote

• There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.

  W. H. Auden

  Parades, Ends, Novel

  4 Copy quote

• So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.

  W. H. Auden

  Fate, Thinking, Long

  4 Copy quote

• The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

  W. H. Auden

  Self, Feelings, Doubt

  "Forewords and Afterwords" by W. H. Auden, ("The Protestant Mystics"), (p. 51), 1973.

  7 Copy quote

• Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.

  W. H. Auden

  Money, Book, Confession

  6 Copy quote

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