“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
Art
“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”
ArtAll Quotes by W. H. Auden
“History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”
History“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“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“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”
Death“Art is born of humiliation.”
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“Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”
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“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“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“A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
Art“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
Love“'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'”
Art“A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.”
Teacher“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”
Art“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
Death“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”
Travel“Now is the age of anxiety.”
Age“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”
Health