“Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”
Music
“Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.”
RelationshipAll Quotes by W. H. Auden
“Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”
Best“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”
Travel“Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.”
Marriage“May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?”
Faith“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
Love“Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.”
Poetry“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
Music“The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.”
Age“All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.”
Art“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.”
Love“Now is the age of anxiety.”
Age“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
Death“Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.”
Experience“It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”
Art“A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.”
Teacher“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”
Health“Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.”
Relationship“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
Art“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”
Love