Quotes by W. H. Auden

"Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist."

"A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep."

"When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes."

"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."

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

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

"No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible."

"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."

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology."

"Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"Learn from your dreams what you lack."

"Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic."

"The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living."