“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”
Love
“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”
DeathAll Quotes by W. H. Auden
“The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.”
Death“A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
Art“Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.”
Music“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“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“Art is born of humiliation.”
Art“It's 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“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“A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.”
Teacher“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“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.”
Forgiveness“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“History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”
History“Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.”
Art“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“Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.”
Life“Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.”
Death“Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.”
Health“Learn from your dreams what you lack.”
Dreams