Quotes by W. H. Auden

"Now is the age of anxiety."

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

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

"In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one."

"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."

"We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know."

"In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag."

"Thousands have lived without love, not one without water."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'"

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

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

"A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become."